USA phone bills started increasing drastically some timer after the breakup, when PUCs started allowing local monopolies and mergers in exchange for promises to roll out sorely needed infrastructure upgrades.
Thiose infrastructure upgrades were never completed (in many cases never started), but having paid the Danegeld, the PUCs allowed more mergers and continuing monopolies when the telcos went back for more concessions.
The end result is that LECs are almost entirely gone, AT&T has been reassembled into 2 halves (to avoid any antitrust litigation) without that pesky "universal service" obligation from the 1935 antitrust settlement and consumers have effectively zero choice in the landline market apart from a few choice areas.
This is the $10 Trillion Swindle.
If you want to know why your phone service is so bad, don't look at AT&T, look at the corrupt public servants and politicians in your state chambers who took bribes to allow AT&T to regain its monopoly. The USA political system is corrupt from top to bottom and the the problem is FAR worse at state and local levels than federal. Overall you're generally only a couple of steps better than the funnay asian countries you like to poke fun at and only a step further from being like the Philippines (Which is your former colony and its politicians are applying lessons learned under American colonial rule)
They may well be charged with treason, however I think you will find that very few military commanders who are authorised to issue nuke launch codes will actually do so even on a presidential order.
The Rand institute studied this in the 1980s, based on 1970s military battlefield simulations. Nuke-capable commanders only ever used them in _one_ simulation and in all subsequent runs they'd surrender rather than use them - even if the other side tossed them first.
Unlike the 3rd Reich, Rome or North Korea, USA military commanders (most countries actually) swear alliegance to their country and not their leader or their military system. Killing most of the civilian population would be a big breach of that oath. The President may be CinC, but if he issues a command which would result in the destruction of the country, men will risk treason charges to prevent that happening.
Don't forget that the job of the president is not to wield power but to divert attention away from those who do. Whoever thought Zaphod Beeblebrox would have a tribble on his head or be so spectacularly uncool?
Apples will lock after 10 failed attempts. Androids don't (but they do start delaying retries) - and a duress print is a very good idea that's not in them.
At least they got it right about requiring a passcode after restarting. If you can switch it off they can't unlock it.
It doesn't even need to _hit_ to cause massive damage.
There's quite a bit of evidence that the Younger Dryas period and the sudden extinction of north american megafauna were both caused by a string of large bolides from a broken-up comet passing over the continent and impacting the northern icefields. The hot downdraft theory is supported by what happened at Tunguska.
It's a bit controversial at the moment, but so were Chicxulub and continental drift until quite recently (and the jury is still out on whether Chicxulub was the only cause of the mass extinction 65mya or simply the final straw after the Deccan Traps pushed things to the limit). Check out https://craterhunter.wordpress...
Other journalists are also facing charges. This is not over by a long shot.
It should be noted that the charges are being brought at county level. State/Federal prosecutors can AND SHOULD step in to curb this kind of legal system abuse.
This is all about money and Peter Dengate Thrush's (Ex-chair) world domination plans.
It's not a coincidence that he went for the position after discovering how much money could be made whilst the chair of Internet New Zealand and it's not a coincidence that he went from chair of ICANN to being a senior staffer in a DNS company. (It's also not a coincidence that his ethics are well-documented as being non-existent)
HVDC going all over the place is only in a few select places - and only crosses shallow water.
Even using HVDC, the oft-proposed "fill the Sahara with solar plants" would need the largest engineering project ever devised by mankind to get the electricity to europe (plus there's that pesky bit of water in the way, most of which is far too deep for power cables)
CO2 to Ethanol to heavier hydrocarbon is also useful in itself, because you can't run transport aircraft on batteries (they don't have sufficient energy density). This is the kind of "thing" where lowish conversion efficiency is tolerated because the overall benefit is worthwhile.
The PCBs on those bases are far more of a worry than anything else. Radioactives tend to decay fairly quickly, but chemical toxins last virtually forever.
In many ways this is pretty minor in the overall scheme of things - by the time any waste from these bases reaches the sea it will be well and truly diluted, but the principle of just abandoning waste all over the place is something that needs combatting.
The problem is that I have trouble taking anything from Greenpeace seriously.
Greenpeace pulled a showboating stunt near McMurdo back in the mid 1980s after collecting several tons of garbage which had blown almost 100 miles across the ice thanks to the base's dumps not being secure against the environment. It won them no friends but policies did change - not because of the protests (and garbage didn't reduce) but because the US military base commanders finally started taking advice on securing the dump from people who'd been offering it all along. The "unforseen" side of their showboating was that McMurdo was closed off to ALL non-military visitors for a few years and that badly affected operations for the civilian research site at Scott Base, including transport to and from Antarctica. Of course this didn't affect Greenpeace, because they'd already buggered off to new destinations on their protesting world tour.
They have a nasty tendency to show up and take credit for other people's work or parade around in front of cameras, destroying goodwill that other groups have spent years building up in an effort to combat pollution issues (Another incident I'm aware of put cleanup efforts back by around 15 years and resulted in the local greens being banned from the area despite having nothing to do with Greenpeace)
The thing they're best at is hoovering up money and spending it on their elite.
There's also the matter of the fraud committed in encouraging membership signups by promising a hand in governance after N years of membership, then constantly pushing that requirement out to longer and longer periods before silently cancelling it. This is why a lot of people are disillusioned by them - this is one of those organisations that's mostly show and little action. They may protest and grab camera views but they don't hang around for the long haul to actually effect changes (aka "corporate greenies", etc). In most cases they do more harm than good.
The autopilot on my Cessna 302 had one function - it would hold altitude and heading. Just like a car's cruise control. Some are even dumber than that.
Nonetheless, Tesla's marketing leaves a lot to be desired, as do people who try to "prove" how good it is on public roads by operating outside the supported manner.
The problem with electrostatic stack scrubbers is that they're not fitted to small building heating systems, which is where the majority of the smog's coming from.
China's making a concerted effort to eliminate coal-fired heating and (ultimately) wants to entirely eliminate coal burning entirely. Part of that effort is a big investment in nuclear plant and massive anmounts of R&D into safer nuclear technologies such as LFTR.
They have a double barrelled incentive to do so - the smog is one thing but if sea levels rise much, 400 million people are going to have to move. The chinese coastal plains are at risk of becoming a couple of hundred miles of swamps, lagoons and mangrove swamps.
"most of the dangers we face are not the kinds of things you can "wait out in a bunker" like in some bad hollywood film"
Agreed in spades.
The most compelling _likely_ disaster scenario I can think of is an anoxic oceanic event (Look it up) triggered by high CO2 levels. This is likely to reduce atmospheric oxygen levels from the current ~20% to something around 11% within a century - which is about the same available rates as you'd encounter at 15-20,000 feet altitude.
It was once said that our decendants were quite likely to be oxygen starved apes. I'm beginning to suspect that this is going to happen in a matter of decades
than aeons.
"Model S is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than a BMW M3, Mercedes C or Audi A4."
What counts is internal space. I've been in some large cars which are ridiculously cramped inside (Jgauar XJ12 being a classic example)
When comparing mass of a EV vs IC vehicle, you're not comparing apples with apples.
Acceleration is different as all the power and torque is available from stationary
Milage isn't affected nearly as much in a EV because mass doesn't affect rolling resistance much and acceleration energy losses are offset by braking regeneration gains.
Whilst not a Tesla, I took a Leaf for a few days test drive and found that the there was virtually no difference in overall round trip energy consumption between 2 routes to work - one of 11 miles with a 400 foot climb and descent in it over narrow and winding english lanes and the other of 16 miles with under 50 feet of elevation change over much straighter, wider roads (less braking and acceleration required. Both routes take about 30 minutes), with a 200 foot climb on the last mile for both routes.
Contrast that with a 2 litre petrol Nissan which uses 20% more fuel on the shorter route than the longer one (that 400 foot climb is a hogback type ridge)
The practical effect is that route planning is less critical for commuting. For blasting down freeways at 70+mph you're going to be expending most of your energy punching through the air but below 55mph the difference is strongly around regeneration.
Once you hit stop/start traffic or "urban mum runs" then any efficiency you might get from an IC engine goes out the window, especially for the latter cases when the engine barely gets a chance to start warming up. In such cases if you can get 1/2 to 1/4 of the claimed milage you're doing well - but this kind of operation doesn't affect EV efficiency at all.
"The New Zealand intelligence services were not themselves allowed to spy on Fullman, who was a New Zealand citizen"
When this stuff started coming out, the prime minister of New Zealand rammed through legislation making it retroactively legal for the intelligence services to spy on citizens - mainly because they were caught redhanded directly doing so without even bothering to go through the PRISM facade.
(Disclosure: I'm from NZ but haven't lived there for nearly 20 years as I was becoming more and more unhappy about the deepseated corruption and cronyism I kept uncovering)
New Zealand has an interesting facade of "clean, green and honest" - none of these 3 claims are true, but those in charge have been selling the Kool Aid for so long that the population believes it and tends to react violently towards those who try to show the truth. The government is aided and abbetted by a very pliable media (New Zealand does not have a free press. Negative stories about companies or influential individuals are usually killed by threats of defamation litigation using laws heavily biased in favour of the claimant - effectively NZ defamation law turns the presumption of innocence on its head)
The Internet makes it harder and harder for things to be covered up and more people are becoming uncomfortable about the situation but there is a very strong culture of compliance with authority and "don't rock the boat". This is what allows corruption to spread from the top down until the entire edifice is rotten. The situation is not helped by the factor that the only legal definition of corrupt behaviour in New Zealand is "Bribery". Cronyism, influence peddling and all the other OECD definitions are rife, but "if it's not illegal then it's OK"
Non-kiwis might do well to look at e2nz.org and locals might want to look at laudafinem.com
Slashdot Mirror
The why has AT&T managed to reassemble itself and regain legislated local monopolies in virtually all states?
Oh yes. FEDERAL bribery laws. They don't apply at state level.
USA phone bills started increasing drastically some timer after the breakup, when PUCs started allowing local monopolies and mergers in exchange for promises to roll out sorely needed infrastructure upgrades.
Thiose infrastructure upgrades were never completed (in many cases never started), but having paid the Danegeld, the PUCs allowed more mergers and continuing monopolies when the telcos went back for more concessions.
The end result is that LECs are almost entirely gone, AT&T has been reassembled into 2 halves (to avoid any antitrust litigation) without that pesky "universal service" obligation from the 1935 antitrust settlement and consumers have effectively zero choice in the landline market apart from a few choice areas.
This is the $10 Trillion Swindle.
If you want to know why your phone service is so bad, don't look at AT&T, look at the corrupt public servants and politicians in your state chambers who took bribes to allow AT&T to regain its monopoly. The USA political system is corrupt from top to bottom and the the problem is FAR worse at state and local levels than federal. Overall you're generally only a couple of steps better than the funnay asian countries you like to poke fun at and only a step further from being like the Philippines (Which is your former colony and its politicians are applying lessons learned under American colonial rule)
They may well be charged with treason, however I think you will find that very few military commanders who are authorised to issue nuke launch codes will actually do so even on a presidential order.
The Rand institute studied this in the 1980s, based on 1970s military battlefield simulations. Nuke-capable commanders only ever used them in _one_ simulation and in all subsequent runs they'd surrender rather than use them - even if the other side tossed them first.
Unlike the 3rd Reich, Rome or North Korea, USA military commanders (most countries actually) swear alliegance to their country and not their leader or their military system. Killing most of the civilian population would be a big breach of that oath. The President may be CinC, but if he issues a command which would result in the destruction of the country, men will risk treason charges to prevent that happening.
Don't forget that the job of the president is not to wield power but to divert attention away from those who do. Whoever thought Zaphod Beeblebrox would have a tribble on his head or be so spectacularly uncool?
Apples will lock after 10 failed attempts. Androids don't (but they do start delaying retries) - and a duress print is a very good idea that's not in them.
At least they got it right about requiring a passcode after restarting. If you can switch it off they can't unlock it.
It doesn't even need to _hit_ to cause massive damage.
There's quite a bit of evidence that the Younger Dryas period and the sudden extinction of north american megafauna were both caused by a string of large bolides from a broken-up comet passing over the continent and impacting the northern icefields. The hot downdraft theory is supported by what happened at Tunguska.
It's a bit controversial at the moment, but so were Chicxulub and continental drift until quite recently (and the jury is still out on whether Chicxulub was the only cause of the mass extinction 65mya or simply the final straw after the Deccan Traps pushed things to the limit). Check out https://craterhunter.wordpress...
Other journalists are also facing charges. This is not over by a long shot.
It should be noted that the charges are being brought at county level. State/Federal prosecutors can AND SHOULD step in to curb this kind of legal system abuse.
And then unusable. Seriously, every change made recently has rendered CUPS less and less compatible with existing systems.
And you think the USA is any better? It's just less obvious most of the time.
The one time I was offered a settlement to keep my mouth shut, I pencilled 2 extra zeroes on the offer and pushed it back.
Apparently if I'd only added one, they might have paid up, but I didn't want to be gagged anyway.
This is all about money and Peter Dengate Thrush's (Ex-chair) world domination plans.
It's not a coincidence that he went for the position after discovering how much money could be made whilst the chair of Internet New Zealand and it's not a coincidence that he went from chair of ICANN to being a senior staffer in a DNS company. (It's also not a coincidence that his ethics are well-documented as being non-existent)
There are already a million and one which refuse to allow + or other non a-z0-9 characters left of the @
HVDC going all over the place is only in a few select places - and only crosses shallow water.
Even using HVDC, the oft-proposed "fill the Sahara with solar plants" would need the largest engineering project ever devised by mankind to get the electricity to europe (plus there's that pesky bit of water in the way, most of which is far too deep for power cables)
CO2 to Ethanol to heavier hydrocarbon is also useful in itself, because you can't run transport aircraft on batteries (they don't have sufficient energy density). This is the kind of "thing" where lowish conversion efficiency is tolerated because the overall benefit is worthwhile.
The PCBs on those bases are far more of a worry than anything else. Radioactives tend to decay fairly quickly, but chemical toxins last virtually forever.
In many ways this is pretty minor in the overall scheme of things - by the time any waste from these bases reaches the sea it will be well and truly diluted, but the principle of just abandoning waste all over the place is something that needs combatting.
The problem is that I have trouble taking anything from Greenpeace seriously.
Greenpeace pulled a showboating stunt near McMurdo back in the mid 1980s after collecting several tons of garbage which had blown almost 100 miles across the ice thanks to the base's dumps not being secure against the environment. It won them no friends but policies did change - not because of the protests (and garbage didn't reduce) but because the US military base commanders finally started taking advice on securing the dump from people who'd been offering it all along. The "unforseen" side of their showboating was that McMurdo was closed off to ALL non-military visitors for a few years and that badly affected operations for the civilian research site at Scott Base, including transport to and from Antarctica. Of course this didn't affect Greenpeace, because they'd already buggered off to new destinations on their protesting world tour.
They have a nasty tendency to show up and take credit for other people's work or parade around in front of cameras, destroying goodwill that other groups have spent years building up in an effort to combat pollution issues (Another incident I'm aware of put cleanup efforts back by around 15 years and resulted in the local greens being banned from the area despite having nothing to do with Greenpeace)
The thing they're best at is hoovering up money and spending it on their elite.
There's also the matter of the fraud committed in encouraging membership signups by promising a hand in governance after N years of membership, then constantly pushing that requirement out to longer and longer periods before silently cancelling it. This is why a lot of people are disillusioned by them - this is one of those organisations that's mostly show and little action. They may protest and grab camera views but they don't hang around for the long haul to actually effect changes (aka "corporate greenies", etc). In most cases they do more harm than good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - most of which is spot on.
The autopilot on my Cessna 302 had one function - it would hold altitude and heading. Just like a car's cruise control. Some are even dumber than that.
Nonetheless, Tesla's marketing leaves a lot to be desired, as do people who try to "prove" how good it is on public roads by operating outside the supported manner.
The problem with electrostatic stack scrubbers is that they're not fitted to small building heating systems, which is where the majority of the smog's coming from.
China's making a concerted effort to eliminate coal-fired heating and (ultimately) wants to entirely eliminate coal burning entirely. Part of that effort is a big investment in nuclear plant and massive anmounts of R&D into safer nuclear technologies such as LFTR.
They have a double barrelled incentive to do so - the smog is one thing but if sea levels rise much, 400 million people are going to have to move. The chinese coastal plains are at risk of becoming a couple of hundred miles of swamps, lagoons and mangrove swamps.
"most of the dangers we face are not the kinds of things you can "wait out in a bunker" like in some bad hollywood film"
Agreed in spades.
The most compelling _likely_ disaster scenario I can think of is an anoxic oceanic event (Look it up) triggered by high CO2 levels. This is likely to reduce atmospheric oxygen levels from the current ~20% to something around 11% within a century - which is about the same available rates as you'd encounter at 15-20,000 feet altitude.
It was once said that our decendants were quite likely to be oxygen starved apes. I'm beginning to suspect that this is going to happen in a matter of decades
than aeons.
Mass shootings are at a lower level than they were in the 1970s (particularly school shootings) and so are terrorist events.
What's changed is that they're being reported more and reported more emotionally.
Despite impressions, society is becoming less and less violent - that makes violent incidents more reportable as they're unusual, vs commonplace.
So the nonexistent 750GeV particle might be the Higgs Bogon then. :))
That flyaway cost presupposes the numbers ordered will hold and every indication at the moment is that they won't.
It's disingenuous at best to avoid amortising the development cost of the aircraft across the numbers actually sold.
On the bright side, the USA will be so busying paying for this boondoggle that they won't be able to afford to go to war with anyone for a while.
"I could totally see shipping trucks being an ideal situation for electric"
Any kind of drayage work would be an ideal EV truck solution - and being a truck chassis you can hang a _lot_ more battery on the thing.
For long-haul transport regular IC (no hybrid) is still likely to be the most cost-effective solution.
"For cross country driving I think it's still gas only for me"
Then hire a gasser when you need it.
Or fly cross country and hire a car when you land.
"Even your regular 240v home outlet could take a while."
Like.... overnight?
If you need it to charge faster, get yourself a 3-phase power hookup. They're not terribly expensive.
One solution for long-haul EV trips is to use a pusher or generator trailer.
Think of it as a hybrid you can detach the engine from when you don't need it.
"Model S is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than a BMW M3, Mercedes C or Audi A4."
What counts is internal space. I've been in some large cars which are ridiculously cramped inside (Jgauar XJ12 being a classic example)
When comparing mass of a EV vs IC vehicle, you're not comparing apples with apples.
Acceleration is different as all the power and torque is available from stationary
Milage isn't affected nearly as much in a EV because mass doesn't affect rolling resistance much and acceleration energy losses are offset by braking regeneration gains.
Whilst not a Tesla, I took a Leaf for a few days test drive and found that the there was virtually no difference in overall round trip energy consumption between 2 routes to work - one of 11 miles with a 400 foot climb and descent in it over narrow and winding english lanes and the other of 16 miles with under 50 feet of elevation change over much straighter, wider roads (less braking and acceleration required. Both routes take about 30 minutes), with a 200 foot climb on the last mile for both routes.
Contrast that with a 2 litre petrol Nissan which uses 20% more fuel on the shorter route than the longer one (that 400 foot climb is a hogback type ridge)
The practical effect is that route planning is less critical for commuting. For blasting down freeways at 70+mph you're going to be expending most of your energy punching through the air but below 55mph the difference is strongly around regeneration.
Once you hit stop/start traffic or "urban mum runs" then any efficiency you might get from an IC engine goes out the window, especially for the latter cases when the engine barely gets a chance to start warming up. In such cases if you can get 1/2 to 1/4 of the claimed milage you're doing well - but this kind of operation doesn't affect EV efficiency at all.
"The New Zealand intelligence services were not themselves allowed to spy on Fullman, who was a New Zealand citizen"
When this stuff started coming out, the prime minister of New Zealand rammed through legislation making it retroactively legal for the intelligence services to spy on citizens - mainly because they were caught redhanded directly doing so without even bothering to go through the PRISM facade.
(Disclosure: I'm from NZ but haven't lived there for nearly 20 years as I was becoming more and more unhappy about the deepseated corruption and cronyism I kept uncovering)
New Zealand has an interesting facade of "clean, green and honest" - none of these 3 claims are true, but those in charge have been selling the Kool Aid for so long that the population believes it and tends to react violently towards those who try to show the truth. The government is aided and abbetted by a very pliable media (New Zealand does not have a free press. Negative stories about companies or influential individuals are usually killed by threats of defamation litigation using laws heavily biased in favour of the claimant - effectively NZ defamation law turns the presumption of innocence on its head)
The Internet makes it harder and harder for things to be covered up and more people are becoming uncomfortable about the situation but there is a very strong culture of compliance with authority and "don't rock the boat". This is what allows corruption to spread from the top down until the entire edifice is rotten. The situation is not helped by the factor that the only legal definition of corrupt behaviour in New Zealand is "Bribery". Cronyism, influence peddling and all the other OECD definitions are rife, but "if it's not illegal then it's OK"
Non-kiwis might do well to look at e2nz.org and locals might want to look at laudafinem.com