On a similar note, 39% of of cases by high volume plaintiffs were heard by Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas. He had 24% of all patent cases in the country. In other words, Judge Gilstrap was 39% of the problem.
Last year, the Supreme Court held in TC Heartland that patent plaintiffs can't venue shop like they used to. Now,
Gilstrap is down to only 9% of all patent filings and 15% of HVP filings.
That's a big improvement. Getting of Gilstrap would be a major win. He's one guy.
Three or four companies file half of *all* patent suits. The total number of patent suits includes all of the legitimate business disputes, so probably 90% of the trolling is those few companies.
To pretty much solve trolling, one only needs to study the business model of those few companies and figure out how to disrupt it, how to make it not profitable.
You hear about lots of different companies being victims of trolling, and different patents being trolled, so it seems like a large issue. It's the same plaintiffs over and over though.
> Not that he was part of the financial crisis, but Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, was an exec that was tried for fraud.
Nope. He was never charged.
If you said you think he should have been charged, based on you having looked at the evidence, I wouldn't argue. The fact is, the prosecutors didn't see any reason to charge him personally.
I think you're considering two steps where you can respond.
1. Exclude yourself from the suit (or not).
2. Claim non-monetary compensation such as a free game.
Step 1 goes directly to the question of how many plaintiffs are representes in the suit. If the lawyer is suing on behalf of five people, the settlement or judgement will be a lot smaller than if they are suing on behalf of 50,000 people. Therefore that step needs to be completed before the settlement or judgement.
Step 2 would be after the judgement or settlement.
Suing on behalf of more people (step 1) will result in a larger total award and probably larger legal fees.
Having some people not claim the award will either a) save the defendant money or b) allow more to be distributed elsewhere.
In my cases, the only non- monetary awards I recall have been a) free credit monitoring (don't want) or b) a credit to my existing, ongoing account with the merchant. So I've never had need to pick a game or otherwise actively select anything with the award - I just get the check or account credit.
On an entirely different topic: Sometimes I help people figure out how to make up for things they've done wrong. (Basically when they decide they don't want to be a shit head anymore.) The easiest cases are when they know exactly who they wronged, how to contact them, and what would set it right - money or whatever. Whenever possible, we set it right directly with the person harmed, by undoing whatever the harm was, by doing the opposite of the bad thing.
Other cases are much more difficult. What about this case: Mark was controlling and abusive to many women over the course of 30 years. At least one of those women is now dead. Others he doesn't have any idea how to get in touch with them. Probably NONE of them ever want to see his face again.
What can Mark do to make up for what he's done? Maybe the best he can do under the circumstances is: Donate to an abused women's shelter. Make darn sure he treats women right in the future.
This Google case reminds me of the latter. Of 100 million people each have ten cents worth of compensation due to them, but you don't have the names and addresses for most of them, what do you do? How do you set that right? Donating to EFF and similar organizations might be part of that.
Even more difficult is something like this instance I talked to someone about the other day: He had an affair with a married woman. The affair ruined her marriage, broke her family apart. Partially due to that, she committed suicide. How does he even begin to try to set that right in any way? He can't do anything for her - she's dead. Her family darn sure doesn't want to hear from him. He owes a large debt, but how does he pay it?
Okay, your post and reasoning makes sense to me now. Thanks.
My experience regarding the facts has been different from yours. As you said:
> At least with the handful of class action settlements I've been a party to, they send out notifications to the people in the class
At this point they already have my name and address and know I'm a class member, so they have all the information they need to send a check. I can opt OUT at that point. The lawyer would prefer I didn't, because they want to represent a large class.
Only more recently I've noticed they sometimes have two classes or subgroups, commonly those who were customers (the company did them wrong) and those who also are likely to have actual damages. If you don't respond, you're in the general class and get maybe $5. If you're in the more specific class, you submit the form and get $30 or so.
An example would be a data breach. All customers' data was leaked, so everybody gets $5. If you ALSO had a fraudulent charge on your card, you get $35. You have to submit the form to get $35. If you don't submit the form, you get $5.
That's been my experience.
I wish I could remember which class action I was part of lately. I was surprised when I got a check for a significant amount of money. I'm used to maybe $5.
I'm pretty sure you're right. When a company goes under, investors frequently sue the directors and officers, claiming that they did something questionable or even just stupid. Frequently those suits are unsuccessful, but defending yourself from such a suit is very expensive.
D&O insurance covers the cost of defending the officers and directors, unless they:
Did something illegal (ie a crime) Fail to disclose conflicts of interest Breach their duties to the company or shareholders Make personal use of business assets
Those four things aren't covered by the insurance. Presumably the "practically insolvent" company won't be able to get / pay for the insurance starting November 1. It WILL cover executives for actions taken while the policy was in force. Therefore executives don't want to take ANY action after October 31, least they be sued for it (even in a frivilous lawsuit).
I'm confused about what you're saying. All along you seem to understand things, then in the last sentence you make a conclusion that doesn't follow from your (correct) statements.
You start with the class, people who have used Google search. That's maybe a hundred million people.
Subtract the people who don't want to be considered part of the class, so that they could theoretically sue individually. That's a few thousand people, maybe.
After subtracting the ~ zeroish people who want to sue individually, you're left with about a hundred million "injured" parties (class members).
How do you figure Google should pay those hundred million people? The total recovery net of legal fees is 5 million.
Helium goes right through solid objects. Plastics have molecules, and holes between molecules, about 25,000 times larger than a helium atom. Helium gas is normally single atoms, not molecules.
That's the challenge with helium hard drives. If you try to use a typical rubber seal, the holes between rubber molecules are much larger than helium atoms, allowing the helium to go right through almost as if the rubber wasn't there.
You may have noticed a helium balloon stops floating overnight. That's because the helium goes out right through the rubber. Interestingly, air leaks INTO the balloon due to something called partial pressure.
I've built things with essentially the same hardware (DVRs). If any cable company is paying that much, they're getting ripped off. (That's possible, companies often pay way too much for stuff.)
For the non-DVR version, the Roku IT is similar hardware for $129 retail (maybe $80 wholesale). The unit the cable company rents you might have a nicer case, so let's be generous and call it $100.
For the DVR version, a reciever / DVR like the Humax FVP-5000T is about $200 retail.
Facebook has a lot of mess, but the *government*? You figure getting Donald Trump, Duncan Hunter, and Nancy Pelosi in control of it will make it better?!
Maybe Shaun Brown is gonna fix everything? Really?
Or are you saying it's beyond salvaging, so it should be demolished in a spectacular Mythbusters-style fashion by sending in Claire McCaskill? McCaskill sure can destroy things!
It's generally in their best interest to cooperate, true. It significantly reduces their costs.
Perhaps not knowing this, companies DO in fact regularly do exactly what the GPL seeks to prevent - even violating the license in so doing.
It is helpful to set up the overall system such that a self-interested rational actor does things that are good for the society. That's because frequently people do the rational thing. For example, if an economic system rewards with peofit those who make cool stuff for the rest of us, companies seeking profit will make cool things for us. Often people act rationally.
However, hang out in any gas station for fifteen minutes and watch the people buying lottery tickets. People also often act irrationally, against their self-interest.
> So I asked a question about sewers in particular
No, you actually didn't. You said one word, "sewers?" Did you have a question?
The discussion was about the cost of deploying fiber in rural areas vs city. Therefore w you said nothing but the word "sewers", I figured you were pointing out an analogous issue - sewers are cost effective in the city, not in the country, so people who decide to live in rural areas use a different method. That's what I was guessing your point might be. Anyway, you said you have a question? What's your question?
> Finally, I do not expect you changed your mind
About what?
> I will lay out my opinion.
May I humbly suggest that prior to coming to an opinion about how life outside the city must be, and attempting to force that upon others via the the threat of government violence, you first set foot on a rural property? Perhaps even (gasp) talk to the people who live there, prior to telling them what they have to do?
Your ivory tower is lovely and all, but if you don't know what a cattle guard or a tack room is, you're actually not all THAT much smarter than us regarding how we live.
For fifteen years I was involved in contributing to the open source software my company used. For three years after that my job was pretty much nothing but contributing to open source, and some level 3 support for the open source software.
Here's how it workes for me. My organization wanted feature A to work better, and they wanted to add feature B. They needed bug X fixed in the open source software. I fixed the bugs that bugged them, and added or improved the features my employer wanted. It worked very well for my employer and I for the project.
One example was a RAID bug in the Linux kernel. A specific configuration stacking LVM with snapshots on top of RAID in a certain way would sometimes lock up. That was the configuration my company used, so I fixed the bug. Most of the other contributors were similar - it's basically a thousand companies, schools, and other organizations cooperatively developing and maintaining the software they all use.
My organization COULD have kept my work private, but that would be costly for them because they'd be having to re-do the work now, a few years after I left. By integrating it upstream, it continues to work, and even be improved, by others in the project.
You mentioned communicating the value. That was my main communication - less than half the cost of software is the initial development. Maintenance, including keeping documentation and tests up to date, is over half the cost. Why would we double our costs by maintaining our own version of the kernel, or our own LMS, when the project members would rather maintain those features and fixes FOR us, and all we have to do is submit a pull request? The project even provided multiple levels of peer review, language translation, and documentation written for free. It's much cheaper and more effective for us to cooperate.
We have a number of avenues we use to find candidates and recruits. One avenue I've personally added specifically targets those who are actively developing their professional skills, people who do continual professional education.
I don't disagree too much with your analysis of the cost of laying the fiber.
There are other costs other than the initially laying the fiber, course. There's maintenance. There's transit / backhaul. There's per-customer costs such as customer service and billing. Marketing. Administration (a building full of employees isn't free), etc.
At very roughly $50-$70/month recurring costs, plus $70 ish for amortizing laying the fiber, total monthly costs might be around $150/month in a lot of areas. Plus as you said, neither you nor is going to put our retirement savings into a fiber project merely hoping to maybe get our money back 20 years later - gotta have a little profit to do that instead of doing some other thing.
You can actually call the nearest ISPs and if you get the right person on the line they'll give you a price, $10,000 or whatever it is. There are also OTHER companies who will just put in the line between you and the ISP - I've received price quotes from them. The ISPs don't like trying to manage wildly different prices for each individual customer. That would be a monthly recurring cost to them to just manage having different pricing for each customer, so they like to have the cost of one-off line extensions paid when they incur the cost. That doesn't mean you have to pay at all once, though. If you want to finance it over 20 years, there are companies that specialize in financing - banks. The bank gives you the $10,000, which you use to pay for the fiber. You then pay the bank back $70/month.
I respectfully disagree. I hire great people and have a very effective (and cost-effective) team. We have a very good mix of skills. We hire the skills we need. I have a standard set of interview questions that I ask all applicants so we can directly compare their answers. (Though if a candidate completely flubs the easiest questions there is no point in asking much more difficult questions on the same topic.)
I say a mix of skills because I learned it's silly to pay someone top dollar to fill out change requests. Instead, we have people at different levels in their career (who have different costs). The most skilled person, who has over 20 years of experience and some recognition in the industry, helps the less-experienced (cheaper) person to make sure they are doing the job well. We get a lot of good work done, more than other teams that have a similar budget.
Are you thinking about someone who *looks* like the boss, or someone who has the same *skills* as the boss? I'm not in the modelling industry, so I don't care what people look like. That's good, because I'm ugly - and highly skilled at what I do. I wouldn't want someone with the same *skills* as the boss because we only need one person running interference between our team and upper management. That's his most important skill set - corporate politics and schmoozing. We only need one of those.
Although I *used* to be in the porn industry, in my current industry we don't use our genitals in our work, so I don't hire based on genitals. I hire based on the skills we need. It works quite well.
Pretty much the same here. I have no respect for the man and I think having him as President cheapens the office, just as much as having Pervy Willy as President.
Yet, remember how we couldn't get to 4% economic growth without a magic wand? Two years ago getting unemployment down to 4% was impossible. It's at 3.7%.
In 2014, the unemployment rate for black people was over 11%. Now it's under 6%, the lowest in history.
That asshole is signing into law policies that work.
Even better, that company owner probably doesn't appreciate the difference between 14 psi (Hyperloop) and 14,000 psi (energy storage to power a city). He can try using the same type of materials for both and see what happens.
For scale, dynamite (TNT) will create a pressure wave of around 500 psi @ 2 meters. A truck bomb will destroy a building 50 meters away with a 100 psi pressure wave.
We've had satellite internet for quite a while now. Satellite internet sucks because of the physics involved. The physics doesn't care if you have a great salesman or not. No matter how charismatic Musk is, radio waves do what they do.
SpaceX plans to use Ku band communications, because that's the frequency range that can give you high bandwidth at satellite distances. Unfortunately, it's also the peak absorbtion range for water - clouds and rain are opaque at that Ku wavelengths. Ask any satellite internet user what that means for their service.
Slashdot Mirror
On a similar note, 39% of of cases by high volume plaintiffs were heard by Judge Gilstrap in the Eastern District of Texas. He had 24% of all patent cases in the country. In other words, Judge Gilstrap was 39% of the problem.
Last year, the Supreme Court held in TC Heartland that patent plaintiffs can't venue shop like they used to. Now,
Gilstrap is down to only 9% of all patent filings and 15% of HVP filings.
That's a big improvement. Getting of Gilstrap would be a major win. He's one guy.
> How many more to go?
Four.
Three or four companies file half of *all* patent suits. The total number of patent suits includes all of the legitimate business disputes, so probably 90% of the trolling is those few companies.
To pretty much solve trolling, one only needs to study the business model of those few companies and figure out how to disrupt it, how to make it not profitable.
You hear about lots of different companies being victims of trolling, and different patents being trolled, so it seems like a large issue. It's the same plaintiffs over and over though.
> Not that he was part of the financial crisis, but Rick Scott, the governor of Florida, was an exec that was tried for fraud.
Nope. He was never charged.
If you said you think he should have been charged, based on you having looked at the evidence, I wouldn't argue. The fact is, the prosecutors didn't see any reason to charge him personally.
there is always a well-known solution to every human problem â" neat, plausible, and wrong. :)
- HL Mencken
I think you're considering two steps where you can respond.
1. Exclude yourself from the suit (or not).
2. Claim non-monetary compensation such as a free game.
Step 1 goes directly to the question of how many plaintiffs are representes in the suit. If the lawyer is suing on behalf of five people, the settlement or judgement will be a lot smaller than if they are suing on behalf of 50,000 people. Therefore that step needs to be completed before the settlement or judgement.
Step 2 would be after the judgement or settlement.
Suing on behalf of more people (step 1) will result in a larger total award and probably larger legal fees.
Having some people not claim the award will either a) save the defendant money or b) allow more to be distributed elsewhere.
In my cases, the only non- monetary awards I recall have been a) free credit monitoring (don't want) or b) a credit to my existing, ongoing account with the merchant. So I've never had need to pick a game or otherwise actively select anything with the award - I just get the check or account credit.
On an entirely different topic:
Sometimes I help people figure out how to make up for things they've done wrong. (Basically when they decide they don't want to be a shit head anymore.) The easiest cases are when they know exactly who they wronged, how to contact them, and what would set it right - money or whatever. Whenever possible, we set it right directly with the person harmed, by undoing whatever the harm was, by doing the opposite of the bad thing.
Other cases are much more difficult. What about this case:
Mark was controlling and abusive to many women over the course of 30 years.
At least one of those women is now dead.
Others he doesn't have any idea how to get in touch with them.
Probably NONE of them ever want to see his face again.
What can Mark do to make up for what he's done? Maybe the best he can do under the circumstances is:
Donate to an abused women's shelter.
Make darn sure he treats women right in the future.
This Google case reminds me of the latter. Of 100 million people each have ten cents worth of compensation due to them, but you don't have the names and addresses for most of them, what do you do? How do you set that right? Donating to EFF and similar organizations might be part of that.
Even more difficult is something like this instance I talked to someone about the other day:
He had an affair with a married woman.
The affair ruined her marriage, broke her family apart.
Partially due to that, she committed suicide.
How does he even begin to try to set that right in any way?
He can't do anything for her - she's dead.
Her family darn sure doesn't want to hear from him.
He owes a large debt, but how does he pay it?
Okay, your post and reasoning makes sense to me now. Thanks.
My experience regarding the facts has been different from yours. As you said:
> At least with the handful of class action settlements I've been a party to, they send out notifications to the people in the class
At this point they already have my name and address and know I'm a class member, so they have all the information they need to send a check. I can opt OUT at that point. The lawyer would prefer I didn't, because they want to represent a large class.
Only more recently I've noticed they sometimes have two classes or subgroups, commonly those who were customers (the company did them wrong) and those who also are likely to have actual damages. If you don't respond, you're in the general class and get maybe $5. If you're in the more specific class, you submit the form and get $30 or so.
An example would be a data breach. All customers' data was leaked, so everybody gets $5. If you ALSO had a fraudulent charge on your card, you get $35. You have to submit the form to get $35. If you don't submit the form, you get $5.
That's been my experience.
I wish I could remember which class action I was part of lately. I was surprised when I got a check for a significant amount of money. I'm used to maybe $5.
I'm pretty sure you're right. When a company goes under, investors frequently sue the directors and officers, claiming that they did something questionable or even just stupid. Frequently those suits are unsuccessful, but defending yourself from such a suit is very expensive.
D&O insurance covers the cost of defending the officers and directors, unless they:
Did something illegal (ie a crime)
Fail to disclose conflicts of interest
Breach their duties to the company or shareholders
Make personal use of business assets
Those four things aren't covered by the insurance. Presumably the "practically insolvent" company won't be able to get / pay for the insurance starting November 1. It WILL cover executives for actions taken while the policy was in force. Therefore executives don't want to take ANY action after October 31, least they be sued for it (even in a frivilous lawsuit).
I'm confused about what you're saying.
All along you seem to understand things, then in the last sentence you make a conclusion that doesn't follow from your (correct) statements.
You start with the class, people who have used Google search. That's maybe a hundred million people.
Subtract the people who don't want to be considered part of the class, so that they could theoretically sue individually. That's a few thousand people, maybe.
After subtracting the ~ zeroish people who want to sue individually, you're left with about a hundred million "injured" parties (class members).
How do you figure Google should pay those hundred million people? The total recovery net of legal fees is 5 million.
Having trouble typing two-letter words correctly in your non-vi editor?
Helium goes right through solid objects.
Plastics have molecules, and holes between molecules, about 25,000 times larger than a helium atom. Helium gas is normally single atoms, not molecules.
That's the challenge with helium hard drives. If you try to use a typical rubber seal, the holes between rubber molecules are much larger than helium atoms, allowing the helium to go right through almost as if the rubber wasn't there.
You may have noticed a helium balloon stops floating overnight. That's because the helium goes out right through the rubber. Interestingly, air leaks INTO the balloon due to something called partial pressure.
I've built things with essentially the same hardware (DVRs).
If any cable company is paying that much, they're getting ripped off. (That's possible, companies often pay way too much for stuff.)
For the non-DVR version, the Roku IT is similar hardware for $129 retail (maybe $80 wholesale). The unit the cable company rents you might have a nicer case, so let's be generous and call it $100.
For the DVR version, a reciever / DVR like the Humax FVP-5000T is about $200 retail.
Facebook has a lot of mess, but the *government*? You figure getting Donald Trump, Duncan Hunter, and Nancy Pelosi in control of it will make it better?!
Maybe Shaun Brown is gonna fix everything? Really?
Or are you saying it's beyond salvaging, so it should be demolished in a spectacular Mythbusters-style fashion by sending in Claire McCaskill? McCaskill sure can destroy things!
It's generally in their best interest to cooperate, true. It significantly reduces their costs.
Perhaps not knowing this, companies DO in fact regularly do exactly what the GPL seeks to prevent - even violating the license in so doing.
It is helpful to set up the overall system such that a self-interested rational actor does things that are good for the society. That's because frequently people do the rational thing. For example, if an economic system rewards with peofit those who make cool stuff for the rest of us, companies seeking profit will make cool things for us. Often people act rationally.
However, hang out in any gas station for fifteen minutes and watch the people buying lottery tickets. People also often act irrationally, against their self-interest.
> So I asked a question about sewers in particular
No, you actually didn't. You said one word, "sewers?"
Did you have a question?
The discussion was about the cost of deploying fiber in rural areas vs city. Therefore w you said nothing but the word "sewers", I figured you were pointing out an analogous issue - sewers are cost effective in the city, not in the country, so people who decide to live in rural areas use a different method. That's what I was guessing your point might be. Anyway, you said you have a question? What's your question?
> Finally, I do not expect you changed your mind
About what?
> I will lay out my opinion.
May I humbly suggest that prior to coming to an opinion about how life outside the city must be, and attempting to force that upon others via the the threat of government violence, you first set foot on a rural property? Perhaps even (gasp) talk to the people who live there, prior to telling them what they have to do?
Your ivory tower is lovely and all, but if you don't know what a cattle guard or a tack room is, you're actually not all THAT much smarter than us regarding how we live.
For fifteen years I was involved in contributing to the open source software my company used. For three years after that my job was pretty much nothing but contributing to open source, and some level 3 support for the open source software.
Here's how it workes for me. My organization wanted feature A to work better, and they wanted to add feature B. They needed bug X fixed in the open source software. I fixed the bugs that bugged them, and added or improved the features my employer wanted. It worked very well for my employer and I for the project.
One example was a RAID bug in the Linux kernel. A specific configuration stacking LVM with snapshots on top of RAID in a certain way would sometimes lock up. That was the configuration my company used, so I fixed the bug. Most of the other contributors were similar - it's basically a thousand companies, schools, and other organizations cooperatively developing and maintaining the software they all use.
My organization COULD have kept my work private, but that would be costly for them because they'd be having to re-do the work now, a few years after I left. By integrating it upstream, it continues to work, and even be improved, by others in the project.
You mentioned communicating the value. That was my main communication - less than half the cost of software is the initial development. Maintenance, including keeping documentation and tests up to date, is over half the cost. Why would we double our costs by maintaining our own version of the kernel, or our own LMS, when the project members would rather maintain those features and fixes FOR us, and all we have to do is submit a pull request? The project even provided multiple levels of peer review, language translation, and documentation written for free. It's much cheaper and more effective for us to cooperate.
We have a number of avenues we use to find candidates and recruits. One avenue I've personally added specifically targets those who are actively developing their professional skills, people who do continual professional education.
I don't disagree too much with your analysis of the cost of laying the fiber.
There are other costs other than the initially laying the fiber, course. There's maintenance. There's transit / backhaul. There's per-customer costs such as customer service and billing. Marketing. Administration (a building full of employees isn't free), etc.
At very roughly $50-$70/month recurring costs, plus $70 ish for amortizing laying the fiber, total monthly costs might be around $150/month in a lot of areas. Plus as you said, neither you nor is going to put our retirement savings into a fiber project merely hoping to maybe get our money back 20 years later - gotta have a little profit to do that instead of doing some other thing.
You can actually call the nearest ISPs and if you get the right person on the line they'll give you a price, $10,000 or whatever it is. There are also OTHER companies who will just put in the line between you and the ISP - I've received price quotes from them. The ISPs don't like trying to manage wildly different prices for each individual customer. That would be a monthly recurring cost to them to just manage having different pricing for each customer, so they like to have the cost of one-off line extensions paid when they incur the cost. That doesn't mean you have to pay at all once, though. If you want to finance it over 20 years, there are companies that specialize in financing - banks. The bank gives you the $10,000, which you use to pay for the fiber. You then pay the bank back $70/month.
> You are doing it wrong.
I respectfully disagree. I hire great people and have a very effective (and cost-effective) team. We have a very good mix of skills. We hire the skills we need. I have a standard set of interview questions that I ask all applicants so we can directly compare their answers. (Though if a candidate completely flubs the easiest questions there is no point in asking much more difficult questions on the same topic.)
I say a mix of skills because I learned it's silly to pay someone top dollar to fill out change requests. Instead, we have people at different levels in their career (who have different costs). The most skilled person, who has over 20 years of experience and some recognition in the industry, helps the less-experienced (cheaper) person to make sure they are doing the job well. We get a lot of good work done, more than other teams that have a similar budget.
Are you thinking about someone who *looks* like the boss, or someone who has the same *skills* as the boss? I'm not in the modelling industry, so I don't care what people look like. That's good, because I'm ugly - and highly skilled at what I do. I wouldn't want someone with the same *skills* as the boss because we only need one person running interference between our team and upper management. That's his most important skill set - corporate politics and schmoozing. We only need one of those.
Although I *used* to be in the porn industry, in my current industry we don't use our genitals in our work, so I don't hire based on genitals. I hire based on the skills we need. It works quite well.
Pretty much the same here. I have no respect for the man and I think having him as President cheapens the office, just as much as having Pervy Willy as President.
Yet, remember how we couldn't get to 4% economic growth without a magic wand? Two years ago getting unemployment down to 4% was impossible. It's at 3.7%.
In 2014, the unemployment rate for black people was over 11%. Now it's under 6%, the lowest in history.
That asshole is signing into law policies that work.
Septic tanks aren't public.
In the city, it's efficient to run a pipe to each apartment or house, leading to a city water treatment plant.
In the country, that would be cost prohibitive, so each house has their own septic tank.
Have you never so much as visited anyone outside city limits?
I highly recommend spending some time time outside the city.
Before you interview your applicants, you can either:
A) Decide you will hire the most skilled / qualified person
or
B) Decide you will hire the person with the favored genitals or complexion
Choice B is called a "diversity hire".
If you set out to hire the most qualified person, it's not a diversity hire, by definition.
Septic tanks?
Even better, that company owner probably doesn't appreciate the difference between 14 psi (Hyperloop) and 14,000 psi (energy storage to power a city). He can try using the same type of materials for both and see what happens.
For scale, dynamite (TNT) will create a pressure wave of around 500 psi @ 2 meters. A truck bomb will destroy a building 50 meters away with a 100 psi pressure wave.
We've had satellite internet for quite a while now.
Satellite internet sucks because of the physics involved. The physics doesn't care if you have a great salesman or not. No matter how charismatic Musk is, radio waves do what they do.
SpaceX plans to use Ku band communications, because that's the frequency range that can give you high bandwidth at satellite distances. Unfortunately, it's also the peak absorbtion range for water - clouds and rain are opaque at that Ku wavelengths. Ask any satellite internet user what that means for their service.
> You are OK with people eating pulled pork twinkie sandwiches until they have to be rushed to the hospital--
No.
> passing the costs on to you
No.
Next question?