"Amazon, AliExpress and their ilk are like wading through a garbage dump trying to find a shiny nickel."
Amazon and Ebay definiitly are(*), but Aliexpress appears to be actively curating their sellers.
(*)Eg: Good luck trying to return faulty LED lamps bought on amazon when they fail 6 months down the track, even if they have a "2 year warranty". And that's quite apart from the sheer volume of counterfeit stuff on both Amazon and Ebay where the seller is gone 3 weeks later.
"The choices were a light cheap model from China, or a more expensive model... made in the US"
Yes, but. how much less would you have paid for a more expensive model made in China?
I'm not being facetious. The company made a deliberate decision to buy cheap chinese-made stuff, but there are plenty of well-made high quality items originating from china too.
If you look inside your US-made item, how much of the componentry was made in china? How much do you rely on that vs the parts made in the USA and what would the consequences of failure of the US-made parts be?
Bear in mind that "made in" labels are where the final substantive assembly is. I buy data safes (phoenix data safes) "Made in England" which are actually Korean fireproof safes, with the only english part being the wooden inner liner insert - that comprises about 5% of the total assembled cost. Guess which part is the lower quality/poorly engineered one?
"Tariffs that would have protected domestic value "
Tariffs almost NEVER protect domestic value. They result in domestic _consumers_ paying more whilst domestic _producers_ become inefficient.
The US vehicle industry is a prime example of this. The combination of the Chicken Tax, other hidden tariffs and a non-standard set of safety/lighting requirements (which is effectively another tariff via the back door) compared to the rest of the world results in a market that's both hard to get into and hard to break out of.
The reason that the rest of the world don't buy many US-made vehicles is quite simply because they tend to be expensive, inefficient and poor quality - they can get away with that thanks to the huge protected domestic market, which foreign manufacturers have largely only managed to break into by establishing their own local factories.
"I'm waiting for someone to show me one that can walk thru the factory, hear the bearings going bad in a 50 hp motor"
You only notice that because you've been trained to notice it
I've walked through a bunch of factories as an observer and noticed a ton of motors with bearings going bad - the people running the show have ALWAYS been surprised when I pointed it out. Sometimes I've been ignored and the motors invariably shat themselves a few weeks later.
Noticing bearings going bad isn't difficult and you don't need a robot for it. Simple piezo sensors will detect it long before they're audible to a human _if_ the makers or maintainers can be bothered to fit them (the other ways of detecting them are looking for extra heat, power draw or decrease in RPM and I've seen them all in use from makers who care about such things)
Automotive factories in the USA, EU and Japan have all had limits imposed on their automation by unions (yes, even in Japan). Robots are accepted in the dirty, dangerous or repeatable precision areas but people dug their toes in when they started shifting to the rest of the line.
Worse, whilst unions are essential to protect worker rights, if they gain too much power then the people at the top start playing politics and force "make work" employment policies "to save jobs" which invariably result in the employer losing out to more efficient/better quality manufacturers - at which point _everybody_ loses their job, instead of just some people.
As a result, the only way to "automate more" is to build a _new_ factory in a _new_ area and hire a _new_ workforce - which also means that _everybody_ loses their job in the old one. This is the primary motivation for building new factories in mexico, china and eastern europe, not cheaper labour. Inexperienced workers tend to turn out poor product for the first 4-5 years - that got proven multiple times in the UK when the government mandated during the 1960-70s that makers put factories in areas where the workforce had little experience assembling cars (This was done to "reduce unemployment" in those areas)
The "highly automated" factory in Detroit employing 10,000 people (down from 25,000 in the 1970s) became a "very automated" factory in Mexico with higher output volume and higher build quality whilst only employing 1500 people. If forced to bring manufacturing back into the USA then carmakers will probably build an uber-automated factory in New Mexico employing fewer than 500 people. Each iteration allows fewer people to be employed even if supply lines become longer and thinner (but the supply chains are even more increasingly automated, therefore employing fewer people for more output)
When you point out that she spent her last few years benefitting from state healthcare - and drew particularly heavily on it thanks to her lung cancer, Randites tend to get upset.
They get even more upset when you point out that she died with over half a million dollars in the bank and she _chose_ to leech off the state to get that socialised healthcare she publicly despised.
There are many high quality tools made in china and conversely some US-made stuff is utter garbage (1970s cars being a glaring example(*)).
The issue was to _deliberately_ choose to sell lower quality under the established brand name. Where the tools are sourced from is secondary to that decision.
(*) An anecdote from my high school maths teacher back in the 80s - he worked as a production engineer in a UK-based heavy equipment manufacturer and had just finished designing the gearbox for a new series of road graders. Management decided that they needed to sell more parts and ordered him to change the quality of the steel in the gears so that the teeth would fail more often. He refused and resigned. The company is no longer in business, having gained a reputation for unreliable equipment.
_LARGE_ trucks are not necessary in most urban settings and if they really need to be there, then they should be loaded with sensors/cameras/mirrors so that drivers have full situational awareness when manouvering. Quite a few jurisdictions make it a requirement and/or mandate a banksman for tight manouvering.
"I as a human driver would have made "differently" from the shuttle AI"
You, as an _experienced_ human driver would do that.
I've seen a lot of drivers make the same errors (failure to anticipate) and I'll bet that programmers are now looking at exactly these kinds of changes.
The fact remains that as the stopped vehicle, the shuttle was in the right as far as insurance goes and the truck driver wasn't paying full attention to what was going on around him.
A huge chunk of what self-driving vehicles have to deal with is the unpredictability and persistent rulebreaking of human drivers. Our existing road rules have large margins for safety in them and it usually takes at least 2 (usually 3 or more) serious errors to cause a crash.
FWIW the biggest subsidisation of road users is for vehicles heavier than a couple of tons.
Roadbed damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure(weight) and the 2nd power of speed. 18 wheelers pay less than 1% of the maintenance costs they incur.
Insurance companies will do it anyway - as soon as self driving vehicles are shown to be safer drivers they'll attract discounts - or human drivers will attract higher premiums, which amounts to the same thing.
Very quickly, only those who can afford the insurance will still be driving themselves.
There may be exemptions carved into the rules, such as a ridiculously low speed limit for manual driving in order to handle tricky manouvering that the computer can't do, but in reality such situations are unlikely. Humans are lousy at parking and the single biggest category of insurance claims is "reversed into another vehicles in supermarket parking lot"
The _only_ way to avoid this is for humans to stop having injury/death crashes, or for machines to have significant numbers of them - and the latter is extremely unlikely as machines pay 100% attention (most humans don't), 100% of the time (no human does), in all directions (humans can only look in one direction at a time and frequently neglect to look around) and drive within limits for conditions (humans are notorious for following too closely and driving far too fast for the conditions, plus they're slow to react when shit hits fan).
It doesn't matter that if a machine may stop if it finds unknown conditions or ones that it regards as unsafe when a human would carry on anyway. What counts for insurance purposes is statistics and they're already in favour of the robots.
"The devs look at me with the "why would you do that?" look. "
It's not just small companies which suffer that.
Airbus have suffered a number of "why would a pilot do something that stupid?" issues where pilots DO these kinds of things when testing to trying out the aircraft to see how it will react under worst case conditions.
Certain switch/router manufacturer R&D departments have come back with the same question when I've asked them to check certain conditions. They may not ever happen under normal operation, but when someone's trying to break in all bets are off.
Back in High school days my tutors used to criticise me for running tests on every input as a waste of time/memory, but it's a habit which really should be ingrained in coders along with testing every condition which might occur, no matter how unlikely. Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.
That was what struck me. Whilst I understand the need for cryogenic liquids to test for leaks in this instance, surely liquid nitrogen would have been a safer first choice?
In 1985, New Zealand simplified its personal and business taxation rates to 24%/33% and 32% respectively, abolishing personal rates of up to 70% (in 6 steps) and substantially lowering its GROSS taxation income. At the same time it dropped in a GST(VAT) of 10% and eliminated a wide range of sales taxes between 10-40%
Except that it didn't.
It also stripped down the tax laws and removed thousands of exemptions and loopholes that had accumulated over the years. The tax return went down from 25 pages to 4.
As a result, even though tas rates were lower on paper, gross income actually ended up rising a little. More importantly, over the next decade the country was able to lay off more than 1/3 of its tax department staff as they were no longer needed. NET income rose a lot.
Then the neolibs got in, shafted the poor and squandered the money whilst adding lots of tax cuts for all their friends.
My point being that what matters to a government is the NET tax income. Taxes can be lowered if the costs of collection and compliance are simultaneously lowered - and the effect of less taxation is an increase in consumer confidence/spending resulting in greater turnover and more income for the government.
The level of evasion taking place means that many companies and the richest deciles are paying NO TAX AT ALL.
If they paid 20-35% like everyone else then there would be a lot less anger, but it's always the rich merchants who are the least disposed to paying their way in society. Sociopathy is a major trademark of such people.
"hey look at all the tax avoidance while Apple's profits go to Ireland!"
Yes, but VAT means that governments are collecting a decent chunk of income that Apple can't avoid paying and it's also a tax that for the most part the rich can't avoid easily.
Interestingly it's been postulated that with a suitably high VAT, there would be no need for company or income tax. The flipside of that is that higher VATs would hurt the lower income deciles extremely badly. You could fix this with a universal allowance or by requiring that companies pay enough to their workers that they don't need government assistance (which are more or less unregistered backdoor government subsidies for the businesses concerned)
'Imagine if the US put hefty tariffs on everything that was imported to "even" the playing field'
It does, in one way or another. The USA is one of the most protectionist markets in the world.
Import tariffs usually hurt the local economy (both consumers and manufacturers supposedly being protected) - consumers via higher prices and the "protected" manufacturers due to lack of competition enabling them to charge what the local market will bear whilst producing goods of generally poorer quality than if subjected to real competitoion - making them uncompetitive in other markets (if you sell in other markets below your local price then it's dumping and the WTO will slap a few hefty tariffs on to your exports until it stops. If you're selling expensive substandard goods then noone will buy them)
The countries and exporters that the local market is supposedly being "protected from" usually don't care much as they have hundreds of other markets to sell in .
(Anti-dumping tariffs are different to protectionism ones as they're levied via WTO rules by all WTO participants. Protectionist tariffs can also result in WTO sanctions unless done via the backdoor of "safety regulations", etc etc. )
This is why the USA car market's safety rules are different to the UN rules used everywhere else in the world, but it's a two-edged sword as it makes US carmakers uncompetitive outside the USA.
The Chicken Tax is another good example of protectionism via the back door. If the USA directly imposed a protectionist tariff on imported minivans/minibuses with the stated purpose of shielding local manufacturers from competition then US exports of the same would be subject to WTO sanction. But even whilst escaping WTO sanction, the tax has rendered US minivans unsaleable in the rest of the world due to higher price and lower quality than competing products (and "foreign" makers responded to the protectionism by setting up local assembly plants, neatly bypassing the import taxes)
Another example of US protectionism is the tariffs erected against New Zealand beef and wool products - which have been completely unsubsidised since 1985. By the early 1990s, they substantially undercut US farmers due to efficient farming and transport practices. In response, the USA imposed anti-dumping tariffs in the mid 1990s with no evidence whatsoever that dumping was actually taking place (the argument was "it's so cheap it must be dumping and that's all the evidence we need" - the WTO disagreed). The unilateral trade barriers went to the WTO, where it still is (these kinds of disputes frequently take decades to untangle). In the meantime american beef farmers get to sell to their local captive market, whilst pricing themselves out of export markets 20 times (or more) larger than the domestic one (This is another example of how tariffs backfire. US rice farmers are in the process of making the same mistake and US corn farmers managed the same stunt back in the 1970s)
One requested clearance the day before the hack was CONFIRMED.
The hack itself was quite a while before that and confirmation follows suspicion. One needs to know if those suspicions had been communicated in any form to the people involved.
As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is execs clearing execs. It doesn't mean the SEC won't investigate and decide otherwise.
"When I got a job at the NASA LaRC way, way back, I had to get fingerprinted, but couldn't because I had been working on my car that week and my hands and fingers were all beat up. I had to wait a week for them to clear up enough to get processed."
Or you could be in the unfortunate position my wife constantly finds herself in when faced with biometric demands for fingerprints (primarily immigration/visa issues) - her fingerprints are so light that most systems simply can't pick them up. (She can't use iphone/android fingerprint sensors either)
1: Pumped storage is useful. 2: Pumped storage requires fairly specific geography 3: Such geography is only available in a few places.
The potential for pumped storage is therefore limited by available geography. Low hanging fruit and all that...
Pumped Storage (or the lack of it) and practical limits on electricity transportation distances is why South Australia had 2 major sets of blackouts earlier this year and even if the proposed Snowy Mountain schemes had already been built they wouldn't have prevented them. (Ie, South Australia is effectively flat as a pancake and the Snowy Mountains are at the limits of transmission distances)
With the ever-increasing percentage of the grid being supplied by prioritised intermittent sources, there are a lot more requirements for energy storage - and those requirements are increasing both faster than pumped storage facilities can be built and to a greater level that can possibly be built. (Hence why Elon is selling battery backup systems)
Nuclear power is "expensive" for a bunch of reasons - first and foremost being the vendor lockin on fuel. The rods are not interchangeable between designs of vendors so when you build it you're committing to a supply contract from the same vendor for 60 years.
The secondary cost - decommissioning - is an interesting one. In Europe, nuclear plants must pay a levy into a trust account for every kWh generated - when shutdown comes around, decommissioning is paid for. in the USA, operators have not put enough aside during operations to pay for decommissioning and the standard practice is to sell the plant to a subsidiary close to end-of-life and then have that subsidiary go bankrupt, putting decomissioning costs onto the goverment.
The _real_ problem with nuclear power as it stands, is safety.
Yes, they're over 300,000 times safer than coal, 10 times safer than wind and twice as safe as solar but the reality is that a contemporary nuclear power station is a Heath-Robinson/Rube-Goldberg contraption that generates high pressure, high termperature steam by having water in direct contact with internally white-hot(*)(**) radioactive fuel rods and then allowing it to flash to steam once it leaves the nuclear reactor in order to drive turbines.
Water is corrosive at the best of times. High temperature/high pressures makes it worse and the addition of boric acid is just icing on the cake. Most of the world's nuclear incidents have been related to or seriously compounded by water in one way or another.
There _ARE_ safer nuclear technologies (molten salts for so many reasons I won't go into it here(***)). The USA proved that at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. The technology is also highly weapons-proliferation resistant, which is likely why the US military opposed its further development. It's ironic that the chinese bought up all that research and are now the largest investors in developing the technology and that they will probably be the largest nuclear civil players of the 21st century.
(*) The core of a conventional fuel rod sits at about 1000C, whilst the cladding is about 400C (as is the water it's immersed in). The extreme thermal gradient across the rod is due to the fuel being a ceramic matrix and ceramics are very poor heat conductors. This is also why it takes days to get rid of heat after a SCRAM event.
(**) The limiting temperature of most fission reactions is about 1150C die to doppler effects. This is why fuel rods are that temperature internally, but water cooled systems can never be allowed to climb to that temperature or the water molecules will start disassociating (and long before they they'll start corroding the zirconium cladding, producing hydrogen gas - which is what happened at Fukushima)
(***) Yes there are some drawbacks to MSRs - which are all solvable on paper and in most cases already in practice - but overall, they have the potential to improve nuclear safety by at least 1 if not 3 orders of magnitude, whilst simultaneously creating markets for things we can only dream of now, such as cheap and highly available helium.
Slashdot Mirror
"Amazon, AliExpress and their ilk are like wading through a garbage dump trying to find a shiny nickel."
Amazon and Ebay definiitly are(*), but Aliexpress appears to be actively curating their sellers.
(*)Eg: Good luck trying to return faulty LED lamps bought on amazon when they fail 6 months down the track, even if they have a "2 year warranty". And that's quite apart from the sheer volume of counterfeit stuff on both Amazon and Ebay where the seller is gone 3 weeks later.
"The choices were a light cheap model from China, or a more expensive model... made in the US"
Yes, but. how much less would you have paid for a more expensive model made in China?
I'm not being facetious. The company made a deliberate decision to buy cheap chinese-made stuff, but there are plenty of well-made high quality items originating from china too.
If you look inside your US-made item, how much of the componentry was made in china? How much do you rely on that vs the parts made in the USA and what would the consequences of failure of the US-made parts be?
Bear in mind that "made in" labels are where the final substantive assembly is. I buy data safes (phoenix data safes) "Made in England" which are actually Korean fireproof safes, with the only english part being the wooden inner liner insert - that comprises about 5% of the total assembled cost. Guess which part is the lower quality/poorly engineered one?
"Apple is one company that isn't competing in the race to the bottom, and is doing well with that approach."
We buy a _lot_ of computers. Apples are the least reliable of the lot, usually lasting just beyond their warranty period.
"Tariffs that would have protected domestic value "
Tariffs almost NEVER protect domestic value. They result in domestic _consumers_ paying more whilst domestic _producers_ become inefficient.
The US vehicle industry is a prime example of this. The combination of the Chicken Tax, other hidden tariffs and a non-standard set of safety/lighting requirements (which is effectively another tariff via the back door) compared to the rest of the world results in a market that's both hard to get into and hard to break out of.
The reason that the rest of the world don't buy many US-made vehicles is quite simply because they tend to be expensive, inefficient and poor quality - they can get away with that thanks to the huge protected domestic market, which foreign manufacturers have largely only managed to break into by establishing their own local factories.
"I'm waiting for someone to show me one that can walk thru the factory, hear the bearings going bad in a 50 hp motor"
You only notice that because you've been trained to notice it
I've walked through a bunch of factories as an observer and noticed a ton of motors with bearings going bad - the people running the show have ALWAYS been surprised when I pointed it out. Sometimes I've been ignored and the motors invariably shat themselves a few weeks later.
Noticing bearings going bad isn't difficult and you don't need a robot for it. Simple piezo sensors will detect it long before they're audible to a human _if_ the makers or maintainers can be bothered to fit them (the other ways of detecting them are looking for extra heat, power draw or decrease in RPM and I've seen them all in use from makers who care about such things)
Automotive factories in the USA, EU and Japan have all had limits imposed on their automation by unions (yes, even in Japan). Robots are accepted in the dirty, dangerous or repeatable precision areas but people dug their toes in when they started shifting to the rest of the line.
Worse, whilst unions are essential to protect worker rights, if they gain too much power then the people at the top start playing politics and force "make work" employment policies "to save jobs" which invariably result in the employer losing out to more efficient/better quality manufacturers - at which point _everybody_ loses their job, instead of just some people.
As a result, the only way to "automate more" is to build a _new_ factory in a _new_ area and hire a _new_ workforce - which also means that _everybody_ loses their job in the old one. This is the primary motivation for building new factories in mexico, china and eastern europe, not cheaper labour. Inexperienced workers tend to turn out poor product for the first 4-5 years - that got proven multiple times in the UK when the government mandated during the 1960-70s that makers put factories in areas where the workforce had little experience assembling cars (This was done to "reduce unemployment" in those areas)
The "highly automated" factory in Detroit employing 10,000 people (down from 25,000 in the 1970s) became a "very automated" factory in Mexico with higher output volume and higher build quality whilst only employing 1500 people. If forced to bring manufacturing back into the USA then carmakers will probably build an uber-automated factory in New Mexico employing fewer than 500 people. Each iteration allows fewer people to be employed even if supply lines become longer and thinner (but the supply chains are even more increasingly automated, therefore employing fewer people for more output)
No,, amazon isn't one of the causes.
The success of Amazon is one of the SYMPTOMS.
Poor customer service is one of the primary causes and that starts at the top.
"the philosophies of Ayn Rand, "
When you point out that she spent her last few years benefitting from state healthcare - and drew particularly heavily on it thanks to her lung cancer, Randites tend to get upset.
They get even more upset when you point out that she died with over half a million dollars in the bank and she _chose_ to leech off the state to get that socialised healthcare she publicly despised.
It wasn't the offshoring that was the issue.
There are many high quality tools made in china and conversely some US-made stuff is utter garbage (1970s cars being a glaring example(*)).
The issue was to _deliberately_ choose to sell lower quality under the established brand name. Where the tools are sourced from is secondary to that decision.
(*) An anecdote from my high school maths teacher back in the 80s - he worked as a production engineer in a UK-based heavy equipment manufacturer and had just finished designing the gearbox for a new series of road graders. Management decided that they needed to sell more parts and ordered him to change the quality of the steel in the gears so that the teeth would fail more often. He refused and resigned. The company is no longer in business, having gained a reputation for unreliable equipment.
_LARGE_ trucks are not necessary in most urban settings and if they really need to be there, then they should be loaded with sensors/cameras/mirrors so that drivers have full situational awareness when manouvering. Quite a few jurisdictions make it a requirement and/or mandate a banksman for tight manouvering.
The ticket was for illegally reversing.
The next questions are if this is a common restriction in US cities and if it's selectively enforced.
Smaller things too. Always watch out for the dog running out in front of you.
"I as a human driver would have made "differently" from the shuttle AI"
You, as an _experienced_ human driver would do that.
I've seen a lot of drivers make the same errors (failure to anticipate) and I'll bet that programmers are now looking at exactly these kinds of changes.
The fact remains that as the stopped vehicle, the shuttle was in the right as far as insurance goes and the truck driver wasn't paying full attention to what was going on around him.
A huge chunk of what self-driving vehicles have to deal with is the unpredictability and persistent rulebreaking of human drivers. Our existing road rules have large margins for safety in them and it usually takes at least 2 (usually 3 or more) serious errors to cause a crash.
FWIW the biggest subsidisation of road users is for vehicles heavier than a couple of tons.
Roadbed damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure(weight) and the 2nd power of speed. 18 wheelers pay less than 1% of the maintenance costs they incur.
No need for a law.
Insurance companies will do it anyway - as soon as self driving vehicles are shown to be safer drivers they'll attract discounts - or human drivers will attract higher premiums, which amounts to the same thing.
Very quickly, only those who can afford the insurance will still be driving themselves.
There may be exemptions carved into the rules, such as a ridiculously low speed limit for manual driving in order to handle tricky manouvering that the computer can't do, but in reality such situations are unlikely. Humans are lousy at parking and the single biggest category of insurance claims is "reversed into another vehicles in supermarket parking lot"
The _only_ way to avoid this is for humans to stop having injury/death crashes, or for machines to have significant numbers of them - and the latter is extremely unlikely as machines pay 100% attention (most humans don't), 100% of the time (no human does), in all directions (humans can only look in one direction at a time and frequently neglect to look around) and drive within limits for conditions (humans are notorious for following too closely and driving far too fast for the conditions, plus they're slow to react when shit hits fan).
It doesn't matter that if a machine may stop if it finds unknown conditions or ones that it regards as unsafe when a human would carry on anyway. What counts for insurance purposes is statistics and they're already in favour of the robots.
"The devs look at me with the "why would you do that?" look. "
It's not just small companies which suffer that.
Airbus have suffered a number of "why would a pilot do something that stupid?" issues where pilots DO these kinds of things when testing to trying out the aircraft to see how it will react under worst case conditions.
Certain switch/router manufacturer R&D departments have come back with the same question when I've asked them to check certain conditions. They may not ever happen under normal operation, but when someone's trying to break in all bets are off.
Back in High school days my tutors used to criticise me for running tests on every input as a waste of time/memory, but it's a habit which really should be ingrained in coders along with testing every condition which might occur, no matter how unlikely. Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups.
That was what struck me. Whilst I understand the need for cryogenic liquids to test for leaks in this instance, surely liquid nitrogen would have been a safer first choice?
So, someone with an unrelated qualification in another field is an instant expert in climate physics too?
Good to know that.
In 1985, New Zealand simplified its personal and business taxation rates to 24%/33% and 32% respectively, abolishing personal rates of up to 70% (in 6 steps) and substantially lowering its GROSS taxation income. At the same time it dropped in a GST(VAT) of 10% and eliminated a wide range of sales taxes between 10-40%
Except that it didn't.
It also stripped down the tax laws and removed thousands of exemptions and loopholes that had accumulated over the years. The tax return went down from 25 pages to 4.
As a result, even though tas rates were lower on paper, gross income actually ended up rising a little. More importantly, over the next decade the country was able to lay off more than 1/3 of its tax department staff as they were no longer needed. NET income rose a lot.
Then the neolibs got in, shafted the poor and squandered the money whilst adding lots of tax cuts for all their friends.
My point being that what matters to a government is the NET tax income. Taxes can be lowered if the costs of collection and compliance are simultaneously lowered - and the effect of less taxation is an increase in consumer confidence/spending resulting in greater turnover and more income for the government.
"No one wants to pay high taxes."
The level of evasion taking place means that many companies and the richest deciles are paying NO TAX AT ALL.
If they paid 20-35% like everyone else then there would be a lot less anger, but it's always the rich merchants who are the least disposed to paying their way in society. Sociopathy is a major trademark of such people.
"hey look at all the tax avoidance while Apple's profits go to Ireland!"
Yes, but VAT means that governments are collecting a decent chunk of income that Apple can't avoid paying and it's also a tax that for the most part the rich can't avoid easily.
Interestingly it's been postulated that with a suitably high VAT, there would be no need for company or income tax. The flipside of that is that higher VATs would hurt the lower income deciles extremely badly. You could fix this with a universal allowance or by requiring that companies pay enough to their workers that they don't need government assistance (which are more or less unregistered backdoor government subsidies for the businesses concerned)
'Imagine if the US put hefty tariffs on everything that was imported to "even" the playing field'
It does, in one way or another. The USA is one of the most protectionist markets in the world.
Import tariffs usually hurt the local economy (both consumers and manufacturers supposedly being protected) - consumers via higher prices and the "protected" manufacturers due to lack of competition enabling them to charge what the local market will bear whilst producing goods of generally poorer quality than if subjected to real competitoion - making them uncompetitive in other markets (if you sell in other markets below your local price then it's dumping and the WTO will slap a few hefty tariffs on to your exports until it stops. If you're selling expensive substandard goods then noone will buy them)
The countries and exporters that the local market is supposedly being "protected from" usually don't care much as they have hundreds of other markets to sell in .
(Anti-dumping tariffs are different to protectionism ones as they're levied via WTO rules by all WTO participants. Protectionist tariffs can also result in WTO sanctions unless done via the backdoor of "safety regulations", etc etc. )
This is why the USA car market's safety rules are different to the UN rules used everywhere else in the world, but it's a two-edged sword as it makes US carmakers uncompetitive outside the USA.
The Chicken Tax is another good example of protectionism via the back door. If the USA directly imposed a protectionist tariff on imported minivans/minibuses with the stated purpose of shielding local manufacturers from competition then US exports of the same would be subject to WTO sanction. But even whilst escaping WTO sanction, the tax has rendered US minivans unsaleable in the rest of the world due to higher price and lower quality than competing products (and "foreign" makers responded to the protectionism by setting up local assembly plants, neatly bypassing the import taxes)
Another example of US protectionism is the tariffs erected against New Zealand beef and wool products - which have been completely unsubsidised since 1985. By the early 1990s, they substantially undercut US farmers due to efficient farming and transport practices. In response, the USA imposed anti-dumping tariffs in the mid 1990s with no evidence whatsoever that dumping was actually taking place (the argument was "it's so cheap it must be dumping and that's all the evidence we need" - the WTO disagreed). The unilateral trade barriers went to the WTO, where it still is (these kinds of disputes frequently take decades to untangle). In the meantime american beef farmers get to sell to their local captive market, whilst pricing themselves out of export markets 20 times (or more) larger than the domestic one (This is another example of how tariffs backfire. US rice farmers are in the process of making the same mistake and US corn farmers managed the same stunt back in the 1970s)
One requested clearance the day before the hack was CONFIRMED.
The hack itself was quite a while before that and confirmation follows suspicion. One needs to know if those suspicions had been communicated in any form to the people involved.
As someone pointed out elsewhere, this is execs clearing execs. It doesn't mean the SEC won't investigate and decide otherwise.
"When I got a job at the NASA LaRC way, way back, I had to get fingerprinted, but couldn't because I had been working on my car that week and my hands and fingers were all beat up. I had to wait a week for them to clear up enough to get processed."
Or you could be in the unfortunate position my wife constantly finds herself in when faced with biometric demands for fingerprints (primarily immigration/visa issues) - her fingerprints are so light that most systems simply can't pick them up. (She can't use iphone/android fingerprint sensors either)
1: Pumped storage is useful.
2: Pumped storage requires fairly specific geography
3: Such geography is only available in a few places.
The potential for pumped storage is therefore limited by available geography. Low hanging fruit and all that...
Pumped Storage (or the lack of it) and practical limits on electricity transportation distances is why South Australia had 2 major sets of blackouts earlier this year and even if the proposed Snowy Mountain schemes had already been built they wouldn't have prevented them. (Ie, South Australia is effectively flat as a pancake and the Snowy Mountains are at the limits of transmission distances)
With the ever-increasing percentage of the grid being supplied by prioritised intermittent sources, there are a lot more requirements for energy storage - and those requirements are increasing both faster than pumped storage facilities can be built and to a greater level that can possibly be built. (Hence why Elon is selling battery backup systems)
Nuclear power is "expensive" for a bunch of reasons - first and foremost being the vendor lockin on fuel. The rods are not interchangeable between designs of vendors so when you build it you're committing to a supply contract from the same vendor for 60 years.
The secondary cost - decommissioning - is an interesting one.
In Europe, nuclear plants must pay a levy into a trust account for every kWh generated - when shutdown comes around, decommissioning is paid for.
in the USA, operators have not put enough aside during operations to pay for decommissioning and the standard practice is to sell the plant to a subsidiary close to end-of-life and then have that subsidiary go bankrupt, putting decomissioning costs onto the goverment.
The _real_ problem with nuclear power as it stands, is safety.
Yes, they're over 300,000 times safer than coal, 10 times safer than wind and twice as safe as solar but the reality is that a contemporary nuclear power station is a Heath-Robinson/Rube-Goldberg contraption that generates high pressure, high termperature steam by having water in direct contact with internally white-hot(*)(**) radioactive fuel rods and then allowing it to flash to steam once it leaves the nuclear reactor in order to drive turbines.
Water is corrosive at the best of times. High temperature/high pressures makes it worse and the addition of boric acid is just icing on the cake. Most of the world's nuclear incidents have been related to or seriously compounded by water in one way or another.
There _ARE_ safer nuclear technologies (molten salts for so many reasons I won't go into it here(***)). The USA proved that at Oak Ridge in the 1960s. The technology is also highly weapons-proliferation resistant, which is likely why the US military opposed its further development. It's ironic that the chinese bought up all that research and are now the largest investors in developing the technology and that they will probably be the largest nuclear civil players of the 21st century.
(*) The core of a conventional fuel rod sits at about 1000C, whilst the cladding is about 400C (as is the water it's immersed in). The extreme thermal gradient across the rod is due to the fuel being a ceramic matrix and ceramics are very poor heat conductors. This is also why it takes days to get rid of heat after a SCRAM event.
(**) The limiting temperature of most fission reactions is about 1150C die to doppler effects. This is why fuel rods are that temperature internally, but water cooled systems can never be allowed to climb to that temperature or the water molecules will start disassociating (and long before they they'll start corroding the zirconium cladding, producing hydrogen gas - which is what happened at Fukushima)
(***) Yes there are some drawbacks to MSRs - which are all solvable on paper and in most cases already in practice - but overall, they have the potential to improve nuclear safety by at least 1 if not 3 orders of magnitude, whilst simultaneously creating markets for things we can only dream of now, such as cheap and highly available helium.