The replacement rate is higher than 2. This because a minority of people die prematurely before being able to reproduce (or reproduce as much as they otherwise would have). This means that in Western countries the replacement rate is about 2.1. Obviously it's higher in developing countries. Worldwide, the average replacement rate is 2.3.
This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
"A rapid deceleration in revenue growth". So they are still going to make money? They are still going to make more money than they ever did in the past? Only the RATE of revenue growth is going to drop, and this is a cause for panic? Here's what is wrong with the US economic system.
1 kilowatt per square meter is a huge amount of power. Assuming the sun only shines 6 hours a day (it's more of course, but less intense towards sunrise and sunset), that means each square meter gets 6 kWh of energy per day. Average consumption for a US home is about 30 kWh per day. So just 5 square meters of perfectly-efficient panels is enough to satisfy their power needs. In short, there is no shortage of solar energy.
How much of the world's population is exposed to deadly cold waves?
Below-freezing weather is pretty unsurvivable unless you have shelter and artificial heating. A lot of the world's population lives in areas that occasionally get below freezing.
It makes sense that as the planet warms, deadly cold waves will become less common - isn't it only fair to take this into account as well?
Exactly what you suggested - taxes are forcibly taken (care to argue property taxes are 'optional'?).
No. I suggested to change the zoning code to provide a new option - "if you want to build a skyscraper, you now can, as long as you pay this special property tax". Any skyscraper-builder can freely choose to take or leave that deal. So can any person thinking of moving to the new skyscraper. So nobody is being coerced in any way.
You want gov't to cut checks to the 80% of the population that is poor, funded exclusively by the forced property taxes collected from new residents.
Actually, in the city I used as an example, 80% of the population is black/Hispanic. Interesting that you apparently use that as a synonym for "poor". The checks I'm proposing would go to 100% of the population. The checks would be funded by people who currently live elsewhere, who freely choose to move in for the cost of the property taxes they know they'll have to pay.
"Income redistribution" generally means forcibly taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. What I'm suggesting would simply mean the "poor" choosing to fully use a valuable resource which they already own.
Nobody would be segregated. You wouldn't even know who got the payments unless you looked at their bank account.
Set the tax rate for the new building higher than the existing tax rate, and you will have enough fund to cover municipal costs, as well as an extra payment. (Actually, you don't even need to pass a law for this to happen - California's Prop 13 means that existing real estate has artificially depressed tax rates.)
Some municipal costs also decrease with higher population density: less roadway area and utility length per inhabitant to maintain, less crime because more people are on the street, and so on.
Nowadays we know how to make skyscrapers safe in earthquakes. Skyscrapers continue to be built in San Francisco, Tokyo, and many other earthquake-prone cities.
Not all of those 30 independent cities are wealthy. East Palo Alto is a good example, it is 80% black or Hispanic.
I have this idea that one of the poorer cities in Silicon Valley should allow anyone to build skyscrapers (or buildings of whatever height they please). And the city would collect real estate tax from the new buildings, with half going to the city, and half distributed as cash payments among the city's current residents (not new residents who move in after the law is passed).
Alaska, which is oil-rich, gives each citizen a yearly payment from oil revenues. Small Silicon Valley municipalities, which are land-value-rich, could do the same. NIMBYs might not like their neighborhood turning into a forest of skyscrapers, but getting a steady continuous income in return would shut a lot of them up.
When I visited Israel, I saw they had a biometric passport control system for Israeli citizens, which apparently relies on a combination of hand geometry and facial imaging. I went over to check it out - it was pretty cool, you stick your hand into a field of pegs and based on that it measures the sizes of your hand bones.
This biometric system seems to have several advantages over Dubai's system. First and mostly importantly, it supplements the passport rather than replacing it. Biometric measurements are often not unique. If one in a million people shares your fingerprint or hand geometry, then even a small country will have multiple people with the same biometric, and it will be impossible to know who is entering the country. But if the biometric is combined with a passport swipe, then the chance of a randomly picked biometric matching the passport is extremely small, and your border is secure.
Second, hand geometry is a much better biometric than facial images. It is relatively constant - hand geometry is not expected to change much in adults (children aren't eligible for the system, BTW). This is in contrast to facial geometry, which changes frequently due to haircuts, makeup, shaving, illness, and plastic surgery. Perhaps more importantly, you know when your measurements were taken. There's no way of finding out what your hand measurements are except by putting your hand into a special machine. So nobody except border control can possibly possess your biometrics (unless border control's database was hacked). As for your facial features, anyone who passes you on the street can photograph and scan your face. So anyone can fake them and pretend to be you.
When depressed to that point, emotions tend to swing so hard and so fast that any mention of predictions during this state of mind is utmost bullshit.
It doesn't try to predict if a person will try to commit suicide this second. Rather, I assume it tries to predict when a person will get "depressed to that point". So yes, emotions are unpredictable, but if you are sufficiently depressed, at some point you are likely to consider or attempt suicide.
It's like saying "winter is cold" even though you might have a couple 60 degree days in December - true enough in the big picture.
Of course, the software could be worthless, but I think such software *could* work, and this is how.
It's not about what you want, it's about what the manufacturer wants. With IOT they can collect and sell your personal info. This is more valuable to them than you realize it is valuable to you.
Potential employees at a nonprofit expect to receive salaries, and executives are no exception. If you don't pay them market-competitive salaries, then you are likely to get less talented workers. On the executive level, this means yes, you do have to worry about bonuses. The question is, how much responsibility did these executives have? How do their salaries and bonuses compare to their peers in other organizations? The bonuses could be too high, but they could also be too low. Of course, transparency is needed to know which of these it is.
A relatively small car battery stores around 50 amp-hours of charge.
That means to fully charge it, you would need to input 1 amp of current for 50 hours. Or 50 amps for 1 hour. Or 3000 amps for 1 minute. Or 180000 amps for one second.
The average house wiring is capable of carrying 10 or 15 amps. 3000 amps, much less 180000 amps, is beyond anything imaginable for a local charging setup.
If she had ever admitted she did something wrong with the emails and apologized, even once for five seconds, it would have given her the margin between losing and winning.
They already don't check ID at the gate. They just scan the boarding pass (NOT "plane ticket") like you would scan a bar code in a supermarket. How would getting your face scanned be any faster than this?
If you want to speed up the boarding process, you could just have more gate agents scanning boarding passes. But this probably wouldn't help, because usually the bottleneck is on the plane, where passengers are finding their seats and loading the overhead compartments. Frequently there is a line in the jetway of passengers whose boarding passes have been scanned, who are waiting for a chance to get into the plane.
If you really wanted to speed boarding, you would add a second jetway entrance at the back end of the plane, to double the rate at which people could board.
A simpler fix would be to board the last few rows in the plane first rather than last, so that passengers storing their bags above rows 1-10 wouldn't block passengers who want to get to rows 11-30.
China can (and will) surpass the USA, so will India and Brazil, may not happen in my life time,
China and India will, but not Brazil. The US has a larger population than Brazil, and that gap will increase (the fertility rates are the same, and more people want to immigrate to the US). The social and economic gaps between the US and Brazil will narrow, but probably not close entirely.
The US may only be 4% of the world's population, but that still makes it the third most populated country after China and India.
Slashdot Mirror
The replacement rate is higher than 2. This because a minority of people die prematurely before being able to reproduce (or reproduce as much as they otherwise would have). This means that in Western countries the replacement rate is about 2.1. Obviously it's higher in developing countries. Worldwide, the average replacement rate is 2.3.
self driving cars, who the hell would want that
A commuter driving the same route to work every day. Or a parent dropping off the kids and doing shopping.
In other words, the vast majority of drivers.
This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.
"A rapid deceleration in revenue growth". So they are still going to make money? They are still going to make more money than they ever did in the past? Only the RATE of revenue growth is going to drop, and this is a cause for panic? Here's what is wrong with the US economic system.
1 kilowatt per square meter is a huge amount of power. Assuming the sun only shines 6 hours a day (it's more of course, but less intense towards sunrise and sunset), that means each square meter gets 6 kWh of energy per day. Average consumption for a US home is about 30 kWh per day. So just 5 square meters of perfectly-efficient panels is enough to satisfy their power needs. In short, there is no shortage of solar energy.
These redesigns are intended to attract stupid people, because stupid people are more profitable (they click on ads and buy advertised products more).
I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
-Peter Gibbon, "Office Space"
How much of the world's population is exposed to deadly cold waves?
Below-freezing weather is pretty unsurvivable unless you have shelter and artificial heating. A lot of the world's population lives in areas that occasionally get below freezing.
It makes sense that as the planet warms, deadly cold waves will become less common - isn't it only fair to take this into account as well?
Exactly what you suggested - taxes are forcibly taken (care to argue property taxes are 'optional'?).
No. I suggested to change the zoning code to provide a new option - "if you want to build a skyscraper, you now can, as long as you pay this special property tax". Any skyscraper-builder can freely choose to take or leave that deal. So can any person thinking of moving to the new skyscraper. So nobody is being coerced in any way.
You want gov't to cut checks to the 80% of the population that is poor, funded exclusively by the forced property taxes collected from new residents.
Actually, in the city I used as an example, 80% of the population is black/Hispanic. Interesting that you apparently use that as a synonym for "poor". The checks I'm proposing would go to 100% of the population. The checks would be funded by people who currently live elsewhere, who freely choose to move in for the cost of the property taxes they know they'll have to pay.
"Income redistribution" generally means forcibly taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. What I'm suggesting would simply mean the "poor" choosing to fully use a valuable resource which they already own.
Nobody would be segregated. You wouldn't even know who got the payments unless you looked at their bank account.
Set the tax rate for the new building higher than the existing tax rate, and you will have enough fund to cover municipal costs, as well as an extra payment. (Actually, you don't even need to pass a law for this to happen - California's Prop 13 means that existing real estate has artificially depressed tax rates.)
Some municipal costs also decrease with higher population density: less roadway area and utility length per inhabitant to maintain, less crime because more people are on the street, and so on.
Nowadays we know how to make skyscrapers safe in earthquakes. Skyscrapers continue to be built in San Francisco, Tokyo, and many other earthquake-prone cities.
Not all of those 30 independent cities are wealthy. East Palo Alto is a good example, it is 80% black or Hispanic.
I have this idea that one of the poorer cities in Silicon Valley should allow anyone to build skyscrapers (or buildings of whatever height they please). And the city would collect real estate tax from the new buildings, with half going to the city, and half distributed as cash payments among the city's current residents (not new residents who move in after the law is passed).
Alaska, which is oil-rich, gives each citizen a yearly payment from oil revenues. Small Silicon Valley municipalities, which are land-value-rich, could do the same. NIMBYs might not like their neighborhood turning into a forest of skyscrapers, but getting a steady continuous income in return would shut a lot of them up.
When I visited Israel, I saw they had a biometric passport control system for Israeli citizens, which apparently relies on a combination of hand geometry and facial imaging. I went over to check it out - it was pretty cool, you stick your hand into a field of pegs and based on that it measures the sizes of your hand bones.
This biometric system seems to have several advantages over Dubai's system. First and mostly importantly, it supplements the passport rather than replacing it. Biometric measurements are often not unique. If one in a million people shares your fingerprint or hand geometry, then even a small country will have multiple people with the same biometric, and it will be impossible to know who is entering the country. But if the biometric is combined with a passport swipe, then the chance of a randomly picked biometric matching the passport is extremely small, and your border is secure.
Second, hand geometry is a much better biometric than facial images. It is relatively constant - hand geometry is not expected to change much in adults (children aren't eligible for the system, BTW). This is in contrast to facial geometry, which changes frequently due to haircuts, makeup, shaving, illness, and plastic surgery. Perhaps more importantly, you know when your measurements were taken. There's no way of finding out what your hand measurements are except by putting your hand into a special machine. So nobody except border control can possibly possess your biometrics (unless border control's database was hacked). As for your facial features, anyone who passes you on the street can photograph and scan your face. So anyone can fake them and pretend to be you.
If you want the next generation of Dubaians (?) to all have birth defects...
When depressed to that point, emotions tend to swing so hard and so fast that any mention of predictions during this state of mind is utmost bullshit.
It doesn't try to predict if a person will try to commit suicide this second. Rather, I assume it tries to predict when a person will get "depressed to that point". So yes, emotions are unpredictable, but if you are sufficiently depressed, at some point you are likely to consider or attempt suicide.
It's like saying "winter is cold" even though you might have a couple 60 degree days in December - true enough in the big picture.
Of course, the software could be worthless, but I think such software *could* work, and this is how.
It's not about what you want, it's about what the manufacturer wants. With IOT they can collect and sell your personal info. This is more valuable to them than you realize it is valuable to you.
Potential employees at a nonprofit expect to receive salaries, and executives are no exception. If you don't pay them market-competitive salaries, then you are likely to get less talented workers. On the executive level, this means yes, you do have to worry about bonuses. The question is, how much responsibility did these executives have? How do their salaries and bonuses compare to their peers in other organizations? The bonuses could be too high, but they could also be too low. Of course, transparency is needed to know which of these it is.
Baby boomers are going to be with us for a long time... Today's management will be retired by the time baby boomers are dead.
Why should a hotel be required to put in wheelchair ramps any more than a house that's being rented out to customers? One law for everyone.
A relatively small car battery stores around 50 amp-hours of charge.
That means to fully charge it, you would need to input 1 amp of current for 50 hours. Or 50 amps for 1 hour. Or 3000 amps for 1 minute. Or 180000 amps for one second.
The average house wiring is capable of carrying 10 or 15 amps. 3000 amps, much less 180000 amps, is beyond anything imaginable for a local charging setup.
At least these robots won't poop on the sidewalks. Unlike the human residents of San Francisco.
China concerned about intellectual property. LOL.
If she had ever admitted she did something wrong with the emails and apologized, even once for five seconds, it would have given her the margin between losing and winning.
They already don't check ID at the gate. They just scan the boarding pass (NOT "plane ticket") like you would scan a bar code in a supermarket. How would getting your face scanned be any faster than this?
If you want to speed up the boarding process, you could just have more gate agents scanning boarding passes. But this probably wouldn't help, because usually the bottleneck is on the plane, where passengers are finding their seats and loading the overhead compartments. Frequently there is a line in the jetway of passengers whose boarding passes have been scanned, who are waiting for a chance to get into the plane.
If you really wanted to speed boarding, you would add a second jetway entrance at the back end of the plane, to double the rate at which people could board.
A simpler fix would be to board the last few rows in the plane first rather than last, so that passengers storing their bags above rows 1-10 wouldn't block passengers who want to get to rows 11-30.
I'll do that once the EU countries give up their separate UN votes :)
China can (and will) surpass the USA, so will India and Brazil, may not happen in my life time,
China and India will, but not Brazil. The US has a larger population than Brazil, and that gap will increase (the fertility rates are the same, and more people want to immigrate to the US). The social and economic gaps between the US and Brazil will narrow, but probably not close entirely.
The US may only be 4% of the world's population, but that still makes it the third most populated country after China and India.