If Comcast techs are out installing live remote feeds for every town council meeting, they aren't fixing the glitchy signal at your house. Alternatively, they hire more techs and buy more trucks, which cost money. That money isn't going to magically appear, the company gets its money from the customers.
It costs very roughly $20,000 / mile to install new buried cables. If Comcast is required to put in 550 miles of new lines, that'll cost about $11 million and that money isn't going to magically appear from nowhere. Either it will come from customers directly, or Comcast can shift costs from elsewhere, such as no longer buying Nickelodeon. The cost exists, so it'll be paid.
One could make an argument that 550 miles of new lines are WORTH the cost, that it's better to have cable available to certain rural customers than to have Nickelodeon for everyone, but pretending there is no cost is just stupid. And no, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts isn't going pay the millions out of his own pocket. Like most of us, he quit before he would work for free, spending his salary providing remote broadcast connections for public access stations.
Would you like to make a case for why it's worth the cost in order to have Dance Oly Dance do live remotes? Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but pretending there is no cost, or that companies don't pay there costs with money from their customers, is just silly. You'd have to be stoned to believe that. (Though indeed many people who are stoned DO believe that money appears from nowhere every time the government dictates something.)
Are you talking about BUILDING a stadium? This is about *existing* facilities, and money for naming rights.
For example my local stadium in Dallas (actually Arlington) opened in 2009, with a sign saying "Cowboys Stadium". For years later, AT&T paid $400 million to change the sign to instead say "AT&T Stadium". That's $400 million in free money to use fixing potholes or whatever the city wants to do with it. What AT&T bought was the *sign* out front.
I don't watch the Cowboys, though. I only watch the Broncos, who play at Mile High Stadium. Officially it was renamed "Sports Authority Field at Mile High" or something, but *nobody* calls it that. That's just the name on the sign, a name not used anywhere but the sign. The sign is coming down in a weeks and a new one will go up after some other fool pays the city a few hundred million to put up a sign with their name on it. There was a bill in the state legislature saying it had to always be called "Mile High", though the sign, and official name, could be "That Mile High Stadium" or whatever. No need - we're always going to just call it Mile High Stadium, regardless of the sign.
> Comcast Ronald Regan Washington National Airport.
A couple of recent stadium naming deals have been for $400 million and $800 million. If Comcast wants to give us, the taxpayers, half a billion dollars for the right to add their name to the airport sign, that sounds like an easy win to me.
Decades? Really? People have been firing wood and embedding carbon into its surfaces for at least 400,000 years. This author is off by at least four orders of magnitude.
The geometry is found by distinguishing between recessed a car with as, which are dark, next to relatively high areas, which are brighter. When the entire face is dark, it's difficult to distinguished shadowed areas, and therefore geometry.
For those who could use a reminder, here's a quick description of the Oxford comma debate, with a couple examples.
In a sentence with a list, you can use a comma before the last item or not: The flag is red, white and blue. The flag is red, white, and blue.
Some people say it reads better without the "extra" comma. They also point out that not having the comma can sometimes lead to ambiguity, because it looks like an appositive:
The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Nelson Mandela is a demigod and dildo collector?! Adding a comma clarifies that "dildo collector" is a separate item: The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector.
On the other hand, using the comma can create ambiguity:
To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.
Your mother is Ayn Rand? Better without the comma: To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.
Some sentences are indeed more clear without the comma, some are more clear with the comma. Should you use it? Not when it makes the sentence unclear, I say. When adding the comma makes it sound like your mom is Ayn Rand, don't add the comma. When leaving the comma out makes Mandela a dildo collector, don't leave it out. Write for clarity, using the comma where it's needed, I say.
The party included the strippers, Bill Clinton and Al Franken.
The party included the strippers, Bill Clinton, and Al Franken.
The first form sounds like Bill and Al are the strippers. The Oxford comma makes this sentence more clear. Use the second form to indicate they party with strippers in this case.
The party included the serial sexual harassers, Bill Clinton, and Al Franken.
Never an Oxford comma when it IS supposed to be an appositive.
> have multiple copies of every library used (updated independently)
Which, besides disk space, is good and bad for security. If an old program needs an old copy of a lib that old (insecure) lib is only used by that one snap. On the other hand, with shared libraries, updating the one system copy of the lib updates it for all applications. There is no reason to think that ALL snaps using a library will update every time the library is updated. Unless of course that were built into the system, but I don't think it is because backward compatibility can't be guaranteed in general, only known for specific versions of specific libraries.
A Snap is a container package which runs in a confined space and includes both the binary and its dependencies. It doesn't have, or need, access to the rest of the system.
It can run on any distribution because it isn't dependent on libraries installed in the district.
There are some positives in terms of security. A snap application is in some ways isolated from the rest of the system, so a security issue with one snap app doesn't affect the rest of the system as much. In particular, just because you have one snap that uses an older version of a library doesn't mean you have that older version installed system-wide, where everything has to use it.
You mentioned a negative (which is also a positive) - Snaps can update themselves without disturbing the rest of the system, so by default they do. That means it *could* update to something malicious, but in most cases updates *improve* security. In the real world, bad guys most often take advantage of known vulnerabilities which have been fixed by updates. So keeping your system up-to-date is one of the best ways you can make it more secure.
You might feel good doing that, becoming protectionist and barring trade. It would absolutely, unquestionably, reduce your real income.
When and why would you and I trade two items? Would you ever trade something that's you think is worth $100, in order to get something that's worth $1 to you? Probably not; probably the other way around, right? You'd trade something you don't need for something you do need. If you had a ton of cucumbers growing all over your yard, so you had more cucumbers than you want, and could easily grow more, you'd trade away your cucumbers for something you couldn't easily grow - maybe citrus fruits or an iPad. Maybe you'd need a big, very expensive greenhouse in order to grow citrus where you live, so you don't want to grow citrus (too expensive), you want to trade for it. You wouldn't accept MORE cucumbers in trade. You'd only trade when you get something you want more, that would be expensive for you to create yourself.
Entire countries of people do the same. We trade things we have plenty of, such as gold, and things we can produce cheaply, such as corn, for things we can't produce cheaply, such as cocoa beans and bananas.
If we didn't trade our corn for cocoa beans, we'd either A) not have any cocoa beans or B) spend ridiculous amounts of money growing cocoa and bananas indoors, so it would cost us $6 to make a candy bar. That would mean we could all afford to buy less groceries, or less stuff overall since US-grown bananas would cost four times as much.
Here's the major claim against China:
Some say that China is *artificially* giving us lower prices buy selling us stuff at a cost lower than it costs them to produce stuff. So stuff that's worth $10, they sell to us for $5. Most people call that a "good deal". It's obviously self-limiting, if they kept doing that they'd soon run out of money making stuff for us and selling it at lower prices than it cost them to make.
"Currency" comes from currens, present participle of currere. It means "what flows". Same as "current", as in "the current of the river". Currency is the thing that flows through the economy, that everybody uses to buy and sell pretty much everything. Euros are the currency of the EU. South is the current of the Mississippi River.
Bitpay is a payment processor, just like any of the thousand payment processors on the web. Their shtick is that they let people use Bitcoin to pay. Web sites say "we accept Bitcoin" and the order form links to Bitpay. Of course, the prices are in dollars, not in BTC. Customers are using BTC as a method of paying the dollar price.
Your tax bill is a thousand DOLLARS. Not a thousand MasterCards, a thousand pesos, or a thousand BTC.
There are many payment processors you can use to pay various taxes. Those payment processors can accept MasterCard as a *means* of transferring dollars, they can accept PayPal, they can accept watermelons if they want to, or gold, gasoline, or BTC. What they deliver to the government is dollars.
There is such a thing as gold currency, gold dollars, produced 200 years ago, but the gold is made of is worth far more than the dollars, so it would be stupid to use those those dollars to pay taxes.
Residents won't get a tax bill for 1.02 BTC. They'll get a bill for a thousand DOLLARS, and they can pay that thousand DOLLARS using a check, Visa, MasterCard, But pay, PayPal...
The discussion above was interesting and all, but you asked about solutions. For solutions, we can get down to the brass tacks and clearly see some obvious truths that often get lost in the complexity of economic theory.
Imagine 5 pioneer families arrive out West. It's just the five of families. They all want more food and cotton and clothes and "stuff". How can they all get "more stuff"? What method of dividing it up will make more stuff appear? None, of course. To have more stuff, they need to produce more stuff. They have three choices:
A) work harder B) work longer C) work more efficiently (producing more stuff each hour)
What about if they use Monopoly money to buy stuff from each other? Will that help them all get more stuff? Nope. Now matter how you move the money around, there's still the same amount of stuff. They can only have more stuff if they produce more stuff.
What if, instead of five families, it's 100 million families? Still the same answer. To have more stuff, they need to produce more stuff. They still have three possible ways to do that:
A) work harder B) work longer C) work more efficiently (producing more stuff each hour)
Options A and B aren't much fun, in most cases. Many years ago, I used to be a pothead, so I had room to implement option A. Working harder might be important in the pothead states of Colorado and California, but generally we probably want our solutions to be ways of doing option C, working more efficiently, right? So that's what we should be looking at - how can our workers have more stuff by producing more stuff per hour, being more efficient.
> So, what's your solution? Cede our markets to China and the WTO?
Can we agree that dividing up jobs so that American laborers each make less than Chinese laborers, or about the same amount, isn't a solution? (Average salary in China is equal to $5,000 / year, with unskilled labor earning much less than that.)
Or do you ANY interest AT ALL in solutions? Would you prefer to drone on about "fat cats doing labor arbitrage" without having the most basic understanding of economics 101? With a little literacy on the subject, you can help toward solutions.
> Some far-fetched fantasy about the government doing job re-training for all the folks who's jobs have been shipped overseas?
That's clearly not going to solve everything. Even when Hillary Clinton says it will. ("We're going to put a lot of coal miners out of work..."). On the other hand, thousands of people HAVE in fact gotten better jobs after going through training that I helped create and maintain. So that is one thing that solves it for many people (but not all). By doing a lot of the training online, we trained more people at a lower cost. Some of it was paid for with federal tax money, more with state tax money, even more with private company money, training their employees, and some was paid for by foreign governments having their people be trained by us. The cool thing is that although Mexico or Texaco pays $10,000 to have one of their people trained, it only costs us $5,000. That leaves us with $5,000 we can use to train a Texas resident FOR FREE.
Not everyone will participate in job training. For example, our welding program was popular, and people who got advanced certificates like underwater welding and aircraft welding make pretty darn good money. But not everyone who needs a job will show up for welding or cybersecurity training, even with it is free. Even fewer will take the advanced classes that qualify them for the highest paying jobs.
I say high paying - we offer nine courses on cybersecurity for FREE, online, leading to three different certifications. That's my field and while I make six figures, entry-level positions at my company, for certified people, are around $50,000. So it is real money. But not everyone will do the training to get qualified.
What to do about people who won't show up for free training, online, that leads to high-paying jobs? That's a hard question.
If it said "not encrypted" that would at least be *true*.
Marking sites as "not secure" vs "secure" based on using HTTPS is simply a lie. The usage of HTTPS is only slightly correlated with security. It's the equivalent of labeling people "tall" if they're black, and "short" if they are Hispanic. In general, the average height of Hispanic people tends to be lower than the average height of black people, but assuming someone is tall because they are black is stupid, and the label would be misleading almost as often as it would be accurate.
Many, many sites infected with all sorts of malware are served up via HTTPS, and many perfectly safe sites have are just fine with http.
Labeling one "not secure" is a falsehood, but worse is that it implies those without the "not secure" label must be "secure", which is a *dangerous* lie.
>. 'Its less efficient to have a zillion independent stores versus a few thousand Wal Marts you say? Yes, but it's much more job-intensive.
You're exactly right, that would be less efficient, needing more people to work to produce the same amount of stuff.
I wonder what you're estimates are to fill in these blanks:
If it takes 1 person to produce and sell $100,000 of value, that person can be paid a maximum of $__________. If it takes 10 people to produce and sell $100,000 of value, each of those ten people can be paid a maximum of $_______.
Let's take as an example my job. My job requires one person to produce $200,000 of stuff. So the maximum amount my employer could pay me, without going out of business, is $200,000. It also takes other things that cost money, such as an office, computer, etc, so that reduces how much they can pay me and stay afloat. If it took ten people to do the same thing ("more job intensive"), the company can still afford to pay no more than $200,000, so that's $20,000 each, maximum.
"Job intensive" (labor intensive) is generally considered a BAD thing, because more people working to produce the same revenue means the revenue has to be divided between more people. As an example, picking $10,000 worth of corn by hand takes 50 times as many people as picking it with a mechanical harvester. That's why the manual pickers got paid $1/hour and harvester operators make about $50/hour.
The ideal is generally considered to *reduce* how labor-intensive tasks are. Most people would rather make $50/hour rather than $1/hour. Also, the lower production costs per unit mean lower prices per unit. Normally we'd say we'd rather have high wages (due to higher efficiency per working hour) and low prices (due to low labor cost per unit).
The current draft of the bill would allow the committee to review certain deals related to handing over "critical technology" or a "critical infrastructure" company. Two potential changes have been suggested. Congress could define more precisely what those terms mean, limiting the committee's review power more specifically. Congress could also delete those provisions as they relate to transactions other than China buying a US company. Transactions in which China buys the "critical technology" output from US companies could then be regulated by other agencies which handle export controls.
>. "Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks.
My understanding is that you can make a simple "pico satellite", or in this case "pico probe" from essentially an Android phone, for a couple hundred dollars on the low end. Launch costs, however, are in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Rather than carrying a concrete dummy load, or a car, why not carry a thousand hobbyist / university experiments? Sure it might not be successful - in which case I've lost my $400 probe, but if it is successful I've saved $40,000 on launch costs. You only need a 1% probability of success to make it worthwhile. I'm probably missing something here?
> It may actually be true that all DB Coopers are black ops CIA,
It may be true that you are CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Unlikely as in million to one odds against. It may be true that I'm CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one shot. It may be true that Robert is black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one unlikely.
It may be true that Robert is DB Cooper. Millions to one odds against it, though.
The odds that he's BOTH black CIA AND ALSO DB Cooper - trillion to one against.
>>The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
> So he never existed (1 in 200 trillion odds in a population of under 5 billion means a 99.999% chance of a non-event)?
We're not talking about the odds that Robert exists. We're talking about the odds that both he is DB Cooper (roughly one in 200 million) AND ALSO he's a black ops CIA agent (roughly one in a million).
> That number also includes being a black ops CIA operative because all of the black ops CIA operatives are part of that 230m population size.
The odds that you are male are about 50/50. Because about half of all people are male. The odds that you are both male AND are over seven feet tall are much less than 50/50, though both are "part of that 230 million population size". The only thing that "both are part of the population" tells us is that it's POSSIBLE to be both. To find the odds of being both, you multiply the odds of A times the odds of B, unless being A makes you more likely to be B.
You said "that number also includes being a black ops". That number would also include being black ops IF we knew that all people who are DB Cooper are also black ops. On other words, if we already knew that DB Cooper was black ops, the odds of a random person being DB Cooper would be tough to 1in 200 million and that would include what we already knew - that Cooper was black ops.
In fact we know that very, very few people are CIA black ops. It's very unlikely that I'm black ops, very unlikely that you're CIA black ops, and very unlikely that DB Cooper was black ops. Even IF Cooper was black ops, Cooper probably wouldn't be Robert.
There is about a one in a million chance that Rackstraw (or any random person) was a black ops CIA operative. There is a one in 200 million chance of someone being DB Cooper. The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
You'd have more drivers delivering more stuff to more people, at a lower cost.
Just one company alone, Amazon, has significantly increased the number of shipments in the US, by doing it more cost effectively.
There are a lot more cross-country 18-wheeler drivers than there were cross-country horse-drawn covered wagon drivers. With more drivers, how is the cost of 18-wheeler transportation lower than the cost of horse drawn wagons? Because more truck drivers deliver MORE STUFF, thereby greatly decreasing the cost per item.
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If Comcast techs are out installing live remote feeds for every town council meeting, they aren't fixing the glitchy signal at your house. Alternatively, they hire more techs and buy more trucks, which cost money. That money isn't going to magically appear, the company gets its money from the customers.
It costs very roughly $20,000 / mile to install new buried cables. If Comcast is required to put in 550 miles of new lines, that'll cost about $11 million and that money isn't going to magically appear from nowhere. Either it will come from customers directly, or Comcast can shift costs from elsewhere, such as no longer buying Nickelodeon. The cost exists, so it'll be paid.
One could make an argument that 550 miles of new lines are WORTH the cost, that it's better to have cable available to certain rural customers than to have Nickelodeon for everyone, but pretending there is no cost is just stupid. And no, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts isn't going pay the millions out of his own pocket. Like most of us, he quit before he would work for free, spending his salary providing remote broadcast connections for public access stations.
Would you like to make a case for why it's worth the cost in order to have Dance Oly Dance do live remotes? Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but pretending there is no cost, or that companies don't pay there costs with money from their customers, is just silly. You'd have to be stoned to believe that. (Though indeed many people who are stoned DO believe that money appears from nowhere every time the government dictates something.)
That was supposed to say "Redhat Mile High Stadium". Not "That Mile High Stadium". Whatever.
For $10,000 I'll name my house âAMD Residence", and put their name on the front door.
Are you talking about BUILDING a stadium? This is about *existing* facilities, and money for naming rights.
For example my local stadium in Dallas (actually Arlington) opened in 2009, with a sign saying "Cowboys Stadium". For years later, AT&T paid $400 million to change the sign to instead say "AT&T Stadium". That's $400 million in free money to use fixing potholes or whatever the city wants to do with it. What AT&T bought was the *sign* out front.
I don't watch the Cowboys, though. I only watch the Broncos, who play at Mile High Stadium. Officially it was renamed "Sports Authority Field at Mile High" or something, but *nobody* calls it that. That's just the name on the sign, a name not used anywhere but the sign. The sign is coming down in a weeks and a new one will go up after some other fool pays the city a few hundred million to put up a sign with their name on it. There was a bill in the state legislature saying it had to always be called "Mile High", though the sign, and official name, could be "That Mile High Stadium" or whatever. No need - we're always going to just call it Mile High Stadium, regardless of the sign.
> Comcast Ronald Regan Washington National Airport.
A couple of recent stadium naming deals have been for $400 million and $800 million. If Comcast wants to give us, the taxpayers, half a billion dollars for the right to add their name to the airport sign, that sounds like an easy win to me.
TFS says:
> Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades.
Decades? Really? People have been firing wood and embedding carbon into its surfaces for at least 400,000 years. This author is off by at least four orders of magnitude.
The geometry is found by distinguishing between recessed a car with as, which are dark, next to relatively high areas, which are brighter. When the entire face is dark, it's difficult to distinguished shadowed areas, and therefore geometry.
For those who could use a reminder, here's a quick description of the Oxford comma debate, with a couple examples.
In a sentence with a list, you can use a comma before the last item or not:
The flag is red, white and blue.
The flag is red, white, and blue.
Some people say it reads better without the "extra" comma. They also point out that not having the comma can sometimes lead to ambiguity, because it looks like an appositive:
The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.
Nelson Mandela is a demigod and dildo collector?! Adding a comma clarifies that "dildo collector" is a separate item:
The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod, and a dildo collector.
On the other hand, using the comma can create ambiguity:
To my mother, Ayn Rand, and God.
Your mother is Ayn Rand? Better without the comma:
To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.
Some sentences are indeed more clear without the comma, some are more clear with the comma. Should you use it? Not when it makes the sentence unclear, I say. When adding the comma makes it sound like your mom is Ayn Rand, don't add the comma. When leaving the comma out makes Mandela a dildo collector, don't leave it out. Write for clarity, using the comma where it's needed, I say.
The party included the strippers, Bill Clinton and Al Franken.
The party included the strippers, Bill Clinton, and Al Franken.
The first form sounds like Bill and Al are the strippers. The Oxford comma makes this sentence more clear. Use the second form to indicate they party with strippers in this case.
The party included the serial sexual harassers, Bill Clinton, and Al Franken.
Never an Oxford comma when it IS supposed to be an appositive.
> have multiple copies of every library used (updated independently)
Which, besides disk space, is good and bad for security.
If an old program needs an old copy of a lib that old (insecure) lib is only used by that one snap. On the other hand, with shared libraries, updating the one system copy of the lib updates it for all applications. There is no reason to think that ALL snaps using a library will update every time the library is updated. Unless of course that were built into the system, but I don't think it is because backward compatibility can't be guaranteed in general, only known for specific versions of specific libraries.
A Snap is a container package which runs in a confined space and includes both the binary and its dependencies. It doesn't have, or need, access to the rest of the system.
It can run on any distribution because it isn't dependent on libraries installed in the district.
There are some positives in terms of security. A snap application is in some ways isolated from the rest of the system, so a security issue with one snap app doesn't affect the rest of the system as much. In particular, just because you have one snap that uses an older version of a library doesn't mean you have that older version installed system-wide, where everything has to use it.
You mentioned a negative (which is also a positive) - Snaps can update themselves without disturbing the rest of the system, so by default they do. That means it *could* update to something malicious, but in most cases updates *improve* security. In the real world, bad guys most often take advantage of known vulnerabilities which have been fixed by updates. So keeping your system up-to-date is one of the best ways you can make it more secure.
You might feel good doing that, becoming protectionist and barring trade. It would absolutely, unquestionably, reduce your real income.
When and why would you and I trade two items? Would you ever trade something that's you think is worth $100, in order to get something that's worth $1 to you? Probably not; probably the other way around, right? You'd trade something you don't need for something you do need. If you had a ton of cucumbers growing all over your yard, so you had more cucumbers than you want, and could easily grow more, you'd trade away your cucumbers for something you couldn't easily grow - maybe citrus fruits or an iPad. Maybe you'd need a big, very expensive greenhouse in order to grow citrus where you live, so you don't want to grow citrus (too expensive), you want to trade for it. You wouldn't accept MORE cucumbers in trade. You'd only trade when you get something you want more, that would be expensive for you to create yourself.
Entire countries of people do the same. We trade things we have plenty of, such as gold, and things we can produce cheaply, such as corn, for things we can't produce cheaply, such as cocoa beans and bananas.
If we didn't trade our corn for cocoa beans, we'd either A) not have any cocoa beans or B) spend ridiculous amounts of money growing cocoa and bananas indoors, so it would cost us $6 to make a candy bar. That would mean we could all afford to buy less groceries, or less stuff overall since US-grown bananas would cost four times as much.
Here's the major claim against China:
Some say that China is *artificially* giving us lower prices buy selling us stuff at a cost lower than it costs them to produce stuff. So stuff that's worth $10, they sell to us for $5. Most people call that a "good deal". It's obviously self-limiting, if they kept doing that they'd soon run out of money making stuff for us and selling it at lower prices than it cost them to make.
"Currency" comes from currens, present participle of currere. It means "what flows". Same as "current", as in "the current of the river". Currency is the thing that flows through the economy, that everybody uses to buy and sell pretty much everything. Euros are the currency of the EU. South is the current of the Mississippi River.
Darn autocorrect turned Bitpay into "But pay".
Bitpay is a payment processor, just like any of the thousand payment processors on the web. Their shtick is that they let people use Bitcoin to pay. Web sites say "we accept Bitcoin" and the order form links to Bitpay. Of course, the prices are in dollars, not in BTC. Customers are using BTC as a method of paying the dollar price.
Your tax bill is a thousand DOLLARS. Not a thousand MasterCards, a thousand pesos, or a thousand BTC.
There are many payment processors you can use to pay various taxes. Those payment processors can accept MasterCard as a *means* of transferring dollars, they can accept PayPal, they can accept watermelons if they want to, or gold, gasoline, or BTC. What they deliver to the government is dollars.
There is such a thing as gold currency, gold dollars, produced 200 years ago, but the gold is made of is worth far more than the dollars, so it would be stupid to use those those dollars to pay taxes.
Residents won't get a tax bill for 1.02 BTC. ...
They'll get a bill for a thousand DOLLARS, and they can pay that thousand DOLLARS using a check, Visa, MasterCard, But pay, PayPal
The discussion above was interesting and all, but you asked about solutions. For solutions, we can get down to the brass tacks and clearly see some obvious truths that often get lost in the complexity of economic theory.
Imagine 5 pioneer families arrive out West. It's just the five of families. They all want more food and cotton and clothes and "stuff". How can they all get "more stuff"? What method of dividing it up will make more stuff appear? None, of course. To have more stuff, they need to produce more stuff.
They have three choices:
A) work harder
B) work longer
C) work more efficiently (producing more stuff each hour)
What about if they use Monopoly money to buy stuff from each other? Will that help them all get more stuff? Nope. Now matter how you move the money around, there's still the same amount of stuff. They can only have more stuff if they produce more stuff.
What if, instead of five families, it's 100 million families? Still the same answer. To have more stuff, they need to produce more stuff. They still have three possible ways to do that:
A) work harder
B) work longer
C) work more efficiently (producing more stuff each hour)
Options A and B aren't much fun, in most cases. Many years ago, I used to be a pothead, so I had room to implement option A. Working harder might be important in the pothead states of Colorado and California, but generally we probably want our solutions to be ways of doing option C, working more efficiently, right? So that's what we should be looking at - how can our workers have more stuff by producing more stuff per hour, being more efficient.
> So, what's your solution? Cede our markets to China and the WTO?
Can we agree that dividing up jobs so that American laborers each make less than Chinese laborers, or about the same amount, isn't a solution? (Average salary in China is equal to $5,000 / year, with unskilled labor earning much less than that.)
Or do you ANY interest AT ALL in solutions? Would you prefer to drone on about "fat cats doing labor arbitrage" without having the most basic understanding of economics 101? With a little literacy on the subject, you can help toward solutions.
> Some far-fetched fantasy about the government doing job re-training for all the folks who's jobs have been shipped overseas?
That's clearly not going to solve everything. Even when Hillary Clinton says it will. ("We're going to put a lot of coal miners out of work ..."). On the other hand, thousands of people HAVE in fact gotten better jobs after going through training that I helped create and maintain. So that is one thing that solves it for many people (but not all). By doing a lot of the training online, we trained more people at a lower cost. Some of it was paid for with federal tax money, more with state tax money, even more with private company money, training their employees, and some was paid for by foreign governments having their people be trained by us. The cool thing is that although Mexico or Texaco pays $10,000 to have one of their people trained, it only costs us $5,000. That leaves us with $5,000 we can use to train a Texas resident FOR FREE.
Not everyone will participate in job training. For example, our welding program was popular, and people who got advanced certificates like underwater welding and aircraft welding make pretty darn good money. But not everyone who needs a job will show up for welding or cybersecurity training, even with it is free. Even fewer will take the advanced classes that qualify them for the highest paying jobs.
I say high paying - we offer nine courses on cybersecurity for FREE, online, leading to three different certifications. That's my field and while I make six figures, entry-level positions at my company, for certified people, are around $50,000. So it is real money. But not everyone will do the training to get qualified.
What to do about people who won't show up for free training, online, that leads to high-paying jobs? That's a hard question.
If it said "not encrypted" that would at least be *true*.
Marking sites as "not secure" vs "secure" based on using HTTPS is simply a lie. The usage of HTTPS is only slightly correlated with security. It's the equivalent of labeling people "tall" if they're black, and "short" if they are Hispanic. In general, the average height of Hispanic people tends to be lower than the average height of black people, but assuming someone is tall because they are black is stupid, and the label would be misleading almost as often as it would be accurate.
Many, many sites infected with all sorts of malware are served up via HTTPS, and many perfectly safe sites have are just fine with http.
Labeling one "not secure" is a falsehood, but worse is that it implies those without the "not secure" label must be "secure", which is a *dangerous* lie.
>. 'Its less efficient to have a zillion independent stores versus a few thousand Wal Marts you say? Yes, but it's much more job-intensive.
You're exactly right, that would be less efficient, needing more people to work to produce the same amount of stuff.
I wonder what you're estimates are to fill in these blanks:
If it takes 1 person to produce and sell $100,000 of value, that person can be paid a maximum of $__________.
If it takes 10 people to produce and sell $100,000 of value, each of those ten people can be paid a maximum of $_______.
Let's take as an example my job. My job requires one person to produce $200,000 of stuff. So the maximum amount my employer could pay me, without going out of business, is $200,000. It also takes other things that cost money, such as an office, computer, etc, so that reduces how much they can pay me and stay afloat. If it took ten people to do the same thing ("more job intensive"), the company can still afford to pay no more than $200,000, so that's $20,000 each, maximum.
"Job intensive" (labor intensive) is generally considered a BAD thing, because more people working to produce the same revenue means the revenue has to be divided between more people. As an example, picking $10,000 worth of corn by hand takes 50 times as many people as picking it with a mechanical harvester. That's why the manual pickers got paid $1/hour and harvester operators make about $50/hour.
The ideal is generally considered to *reduce* how labor-intensive tasks are. Most people would rather make $50/hour rather than $1/hour. Also, the lower production costs per unit mean lower prices per unit. Normally we'd say we'd rather have high wages (due to higher efficiency per working hour) and low prices (due to low labor cost per unit).
The current draft of the bill would allow the committee to review certain deals related to handing over "critical technology" or a "critical infrastructure" company. Two potential changes have been suggested. Congress could define more precisely what those terms mean, limiting the committee's review power more specifically. Congress could also delete those provisions as they relate to transactions other than China buying a US company. Transactions in which China buys the "critical technology" output from US companies could then be regulated by other agencies which handle export controls.
>. "Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks.
My understanding is that you can make a simple "pico satellite", or in this case "pico probe" from essentially an Android phone, for a couple hundred dollars on the low end. Launch costs, however, are in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Rather than carrying a concrete dummy load, or a car, why not carry a thousand hobbyist / university experiments? Sure it might not be successful - in which case I've lost my $400 probe, but if it is successful I've saved $40,000 on launch costs. You only need a 1% probability of success to make it worthwhile. I'm probably missing something here?
Those who control many shares, and thus stand to lose a lot of money if the company does wrong, have a lot of power in electing the board.
> It may actually be true that all DB Coopers are black ops CIA,
It may be true that you are CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Unlikely as in million to one odds against.
It may be true that I'm CIA black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one shot.
It may be true that Robert is black ops. Unlikely though. Million to one unlikely.
It may be true that Robert is DB Cooper. Millions to one odds against it, though.
The odds that he's BOTH black CIA AND ALSO DB Cooper - trillion to one against.
>>The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
> So he never existed (1 in 200 trillion odds in a population of under 5 billion means a 99.999% chance of a non-event)?
We're not talking about the odds that Robert exists. We're talking about the odds that both he is DB Cooper (roughly one in 200 million) AND ALSO he's a black ops CIA agent (roughly one in a million).
> That number also includes being a black ops CIA operative because all of the black ops CIA operatives are part of that 230m population size.
The odds that you are male are about 50/50. Because about half of all people are male. The odds that you are both male AND are over seven feet tall are much less than 50/50, though both are "part of that 230 million population size". The only thing that "both are part of the population" tells us is that it's POSSIBLE to be both. To find the odds of being both, you multiply the odds of A times the odds of B, unless being A makes you more likely to be B.
You said "that number also includes being a black ops". That number would also include being black ops IF we knew that all people who are DB Cooper are also black ops. On other words, if we already knew that DB Cooper was black ops, the odds of a random person being DB Cooper would be tough to 1in 200 million and that would include what we already knew - that Cooper was black ops.
In fact we know that very, very few people are CIA black ops. It's very unlikely that I'm black ops, very unlikely that you're CIA black ops, and very unlikely that DB Cooper was black ops. Even IF Cooper was black ops, Cooper probably wouldn't be Robert.
There is about a one in a million chance that Rackstraw (or any random person) was a black ops CIA operative. There is a one in 200 million chance of someone being DB Cooper. The odds that a person is BOTH DB Cooper and a black ops CIA operative is 1 in 200 trillion.
You'd have more drivers delivering more stuff to more people, at a lower cost.
Just one company alone, Amazon, has significantly increased the number of shipments in the US, by doing it more cost effectively.
There are a lot more cross-country 18-wheeler drivers than there were cross-country horse-drawn covered wagon drivers. With more drivers, how is the cost of 18-wheeler transportation lower than the cost of horse drawn wagons? Because more truck drivers deliver MORE STUFF, thereby greatly decreasing the cost per item.