That's okay, we make up for it at the refinery and drilling platforms.
Only if you know that the charging station isn't getting its electricity from coal or gas, like almost 70% of electricity generated in the US.
The only thing impeding electrics is politics
The two things impeding electrics are politics and battery size/weight to storage ratio. No wait...
The three things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, and the high cost of solar power. Umm...
The four things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, the high cost of solar power, and the fear of nuclear power
Amongst the things impeding electrics...
It's like the original iPod. The original slashdot review was right - No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Where it was wrong, and why the iPod won, was because you could buy music in iTunes and you couldn't do that with other mp3 players. In the same way, the technology that beats ICE will not necessarily be faster, or cheaper, but rather, will have some other benefit that ICE can't compete with. Lots of people here are saying they can't wait for autonomous vehicles - I would agree that is a game breaker that will disrupt individual car ownership/commuting.
If you ask me, soon all cars will become basically plug-in hybrids, to take advantage of regenerative braking and high torque of electric, with petrol to deal with range anxiety (even more than actual range problems).
Some PZEV ICE's have emissions that are cleaner than the outside air. A modern electric scores a lot of points against an 80's k car but the quality of an ICE is a moving target.
If past technological jumps can serve as a guide, the big switch to electric will occur, if at all, not because the new technology beats the old technology in things that the old technology is working on as well, because new technologies almost never can catch up to the benefits of an old technolody. But rather, it will occur when the new technology does something that the old technology doesn't do at all, not even poorly. I'm not sure what that is yet, but if electric car advocates are waiting for electric vehicles to catch up and surpass ICE, they might have a long wait
In theory, yes, the ref announces, say, "3 minutes", and the game is supposed to end in 3 minutes, but that is just an approximation. It is generally understood that if the "real" stoppage time was 3 minutes, 10 seconds, but one team is in the middle of an attack at 3 minutes, 9 seconds, the ref will let the series play out before blowing the whistle.
The evidence is the disproportionately large number of games with a game winning goal in stoppage time, which end a second or two after the ball is inbounded again. And the infrequency (like, never) of a theoretical "buzzer beater" that was kicked before the whistle blows and then disallowed because the ref blew the whistle ending the game while the ball was in-flight.
This. If baseball wanted to have a set strike zone, they would have invented some kind of moveable net like device like a goal. But the human element is a big part of the sport. There is an aesthetic quality that is essential in most sports that defies simple mechanization, and in baseball, that is the strike zone. In basketball, it is the little travel before a nice dunk, and in soccer, it is the amount of stoppage time. If every travel was rigidly called, or if a soccer game stopped at exactly the correct time, even in the middle of good possession, these sports would be worse off.
The question isn't what I think *should* be, it's what I think about what they already *did*. Of course I think that banks should have to encrypt data over their website. And I would support regulation that requires it, and enforcement of that regulation. But not holding them responsible for something that wasn't in the rules when they did it.
Further, there is a big difference between being able to sniff packets in the clear and reverse-engineering a car's ROM. How perfect does a car's system have to be before you don't fault them? No system will ever be unhackable, so when whatever system they use gets hacked, are they always going to be held responsible in hindsight in your eyes?
If a carmaker builds a car that explodes in a normal accident, then they are negligent. But if they build a car that explodes when someone fires an RPG at it, I don't blame the automaker.
The kind of hack that takes control of a car and disables the brakes is not an accident. It is like someone cutting the brake lines. And we don't require car manufacturers to make brake lines out of triply reinforced kevlar and steel so that people can't maliciously cut through them, nor require automakers to wrap the car in fireproof material in case somebody douses it in gasoline and sets fire to it. They just need to be enough to make it through standard operating conditions, not outright attacks.
There will always be security holes as long as there is enough reason for someone to want to take control of a car. So although I think it is a good idea for carmakers to build better systems ("Mercedes Benz - the only luxury car that isn't affected by the ZeusMobile trojan!"), I think assigning liability in hindsight is a bit harsh. But some additional regulations that require some of the obvious best practices (air-gapped systems, etc) would also make sense.
The points that you (and AC) raise are legitimate concerns, and the way that they have been addressed is by giving ex ante review by the courts on probable cause and ex post review as to the admissibility of the evidence. Of course one can always say that these reviews are insufficient, but the whole point of a warrant is for the state to acquire specific evidence of a crime, and the proper time for the target to challenge it and have it reviewed is ex post. If targets were able to challenge warrants before they were executed it would give criminals plenty of opportunity to destroy evidence that they knew the government is looking for. And if you are saying that 2 judicial reviews are not sufficient to ensure justice for the accused, then why would 3 (including Facebook who at the end of the day doesn't care as much as you do) provide the standard of justice that you want?
Note that this is very different from a subpoena, which is what Facebook argued the warrant was really like. With a subpoena, the whole process is 2 sided, because the subpoena'd party is being asked to actually create evidence, such as answering questions in a deposition. So there is no fear that the evidence can be destroyed - it doesn't exist yet! However, actually getting the evidence that you want is, by its very nature, more difficult because it is not simply sitting on the floor of a garage or something.
But the important thing to point out is that it is much easier to serve somebody with a subpoena than it is to obtain a warrant. If Facebook had won, it would have meant that investigators would have had to prove the probable cause standard to obtain the warrant (like a warrant), then would have to fight to actually get the information (like a subpoena) which really doesn't make sense.
If you think that warrants don't currently provide sufficient protection for individuals, then you should provide those additional protections to all defendants, not just those whose potentially incriminating evidence is "on a computer." But before you say that you want targets to have their say before a warrant is executed, think hard about what that means for the man standing in the doorway, trying to read the warrant as the police show up at the door, trying to figure out what to do next. If he doesn't speak up, does he lose his right to object to the warrant at trial? Does he have a time limit for how long he can review it? The fact that the target can't contest the warrant before it is served is actually a protection because it puts the review in the correct place - in a courtroom in the bright light of day instead of a traffic stop or a sidewalk pat down.
[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is not something new at all, and not at all at odds with the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment protects you from "unreasonable searches" - not *all* searches, and they can't issue the warrant in the first place without probable cause (as determined by a judge who signs the warrant). Lastly, the place to be searched (Facebook) and the things to be seized (photos and comments) are well specified. Where is the 4th amendment violation?
If you lived at any time since the founding of this great Republic, and stole your neighbor's pig and ate half of it, then hid the leftovers at a friend's house, then the authorities could search your friend's house looking for the the remaining bacon, even though you did the crime and it is your neighbor's property that is being searched. Just because your friend's house is now "on a computer" and the incriminating evidence is a photograph instead of a pig doesn't change any of that logic.
This case has nothing to do with "nonsensical legislation." It is straightforward rules of evidence and criminal procedure. The judge didn't say the warrant was OK, she just said that:
1) an invalid warrant "on a computer" is the same as an invalid warrant i.r.l. Meaning that a properly issued warrant gets served, then the thing the prosecutor wants to search gets searched, then if the defendant has reason to believe that the warrant was improperly issued or the search was done improperly, then those issues get brought up at trial to determine the admissibility of the evidence obtained from the search. It's what you see in courtroom dramas when evidence gets thrown out at trial - note that it is getting thrown out at trial, not being prevented from being found in the first place.
2) Even if the warrant was improper, Facebook isn't the defendant here and isn't the right person to challenge it anyways. Let's say the prosecutors suspect that you used rat poison bought at the local mom & pop general store to poison somebody. And the mom & pop store doesn't have any computers - you paid cash and they just took an old fashioned carbon copy imprint of your credit card. So they get a warrant to go through all those paper receipts to prove that you bought the rat poison. The mom & pop store isn't in the position to challenge that warrant, only you are. This case with Facebook is the same thing just "on a computer"
If we want to hold that "on a computer" isn't anything unique or different for patent purposes, we can't argue that "on a computer" has a different meaning for rules of evidence in a criminal proceeding.
Any time you have an in-group/out-group dynamic, you have to be careful that it doesn't turn into one of the many times in human history when that becomes a source of unspeakable pain and suffering. Snubbing the contributions of other nations in the control room paid for by American taxpayers by employees whose paychecks are paid by American taxpayers is not really comparable to, say, African colonization or the First World War. Maybe you can hope that humans stop seeing some people as part of their group and other as not part of that group, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Since that way of viewing the world seems to be hard wired into humanity, I think it is great when it gets channeled into increasing human knowledge, or even scoring more goals than the guys in the red jerseys, rather than "let's slaughter them because they talk funny."
I'm not sure I understand how "surge pricing" will increase drunk driving fatalities. I guess you are thinking that someone gets out of a bar to go home, and because surge pricing is too expensive, they drive home themselves instead of calling a cab/Uber (or instead of someone else setting one up for them). But the limitation on the availability of cabs is because there are more people looking for cabs than there are cabs on the street. Surge pricing brings more cabs out on the street, since supply curves slope upwards. With more cabs on the street, there are more drunk people getting rides home. You can't have a scenario where surge pricing is in effect because there is a lot of demand for cabs, and at the same time, having less people using cabs.
I'm not sure that is what is happening here. It seems reasonable that a rocket owner will refuse to take liability for the stuff on the rocket, since a rocket blowing up is not uncommon. So they basically say, "you can send stuff on our rocket at your own risk." Maybe the satellite owner should go out and buy insurance, but if it was up to the rocket owner to buy the insurance they would just pass that exact cost on to the payload owner (making the payload owner pay for the insurance indirectly).
So the question is, if a Boeing (or whatever) satellite was destroyed on a NASA rocket that blew up, did NASA reimburse Boeing for the damages, or was it the same as here? And then, if it is always the payload owner who bears the risk, should the US government buy insurance? I think the answer to that is no, since the cost of insurance will have to be greater than the expected cost of actual losses in the long run, and the government can afford to self-insure in this case.
I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but you can't compare the United States today to China today. China is undergoing one of the world's largest mass migrations in the history of the world, as it has gone from about 30% urban to 50% urban in just about 10 years. The US has been about 3/4 urbanized for the last 40 years. So China needs new buildings because people are moving to new places. In the US, cities just aren't growing as fast.
For example, everybody has heard of how difficult it is to find a place to live in San Francisco (or how expensive it is) because of the lack of new building and the large influx of new people. But San Francisco is only growing about 10,000 people per year. In China, many cities are growing at 10 or 50 *times* that amount. Without building lots of excess capacity (that is quickly used up) they could never keep pace.
Sure those sites will be offline, but just as you can get to the next floor on a stopped escalator, you can communicate with anybody in the world on an internet without facebook and twitter. You just have to put forth a little more effort than just standing there.
Speaking of Die Hard and "key sites" like facebook, one of my favorite scenes in any movie is in the first Die Hard when the terrorists shut down the building, there are a bunch of cut scenes to big locks engaging and the building going into lockdown. However, one of those scenes is a very dramatic shot of the escalators stopping. Because of course that would prevent anybody from getting to the next level of the building. Similarly, if Facebook and Twitter were shut down, only the totally clueless would be hindered in any meaningful way.
Facebook and Twitter - the escalators of the internet.
The whole "Chinese ghost city" bubble tends to be misunderstood. Sure there are boondoggles in Mongolia but a lot of those ghost cities are basically extensions of boomtowns. And it is tough for people to understand just how big a boomtown in China is; Shenzen is adding almost 300,000 people every year, Tianjin almost 600,000. So the general area of Shenzen needs to build a city the size of Pittsbugh, and Tianjin needs to build a city the size of Boston *every year*. Most of those empty cities were built in anticipation of people relocating from elsewhere and have filled up quickly. And for those that haven't, with building on that massive a scale, if they build residences for an extra 100,000 people in the wrong place here and there it's hardly a sign of foolhardy building that isn't necessary *somewhere*.
You are confusing money, value, creation, and notional. Not everything that has value is money. And the notional of derivative contracts is not the same as its value. If we make a bet on a coin toss for $100, we have created $100 of notional, not of value, and we have certainly not created $100 of money.
The real Greek position, which no one will say in public because there is too much national pride at stake, is that the bankers (i.e. Germany) *should* give handouts to Greece on a moral basis. Germany doesn't have any particular obligation to, say, New Zealand, and so the idea of German taxpayers shoveling a bunch of Euros to the Kiwis each month is kind of ridiculous. But for completely non-economic reasons, the "European Core" such as Germany and France *want* Greece and other poorer, less productive countries (like Portugal) to be part of the "European Project." Greece does not have the resources, such as a highly productive, skilled, and educated populace that Germany and France do, so Greece does not naturally fit with Germany and France and that is the source of the disagreement.
Germany then says, "If you cut your pensions, reduce corruption, and collect taxes you will be more like Germany and then we will all fit together."
But Greece says, "That may help in the long run but 1, if you want us in your project so badly then you must give us financial support (handouts) in the form of fiscal transfers, and 2, we are Greece and don't want to be Germany."
So they all kind of want to stay together, but Greece wants a monetary and fiscal policy that enables them to maintain a high standard of living, while Germany wants every country to be rich so that changes to monetary and fiscal policy are unnecessary.
In all fairness, the reason why this is such a mess is because the Greeks can't file bankruptcy. The only reason we in America can "file bankruptcy" is because there is a law (with sections like "Chapter 11" and "Chapter 13" which is where those terms come from) that we can take advantage of that forces creditors to accept certain kinds of debt restructurings, where creditors generally will incur some loss and the debtor will generally have to fulfill some kinds of restrictive conditions. Because these laws are already on the books, when someone (or a company) gets into trouble, there is an established legal process that tells the borrower what to do so that they can "move on."
But there is no "International Bankruptcy Court." Let's say Greece tries to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York City and a court there says, "according to our laws, Greece has to do x, y, and z, and give the proceeds to your creditors. And creditors, in exchange, you no longer have a claim against the government or people of Greece," but there is no reason why the European institutions that are owed money would have to listen to the U.S. court. So instead, they are trying to make up a bankruptcy process as they go along, which is going to seem ad hoc (because it is) and potentially arbitrary and unfair (because no one agreed to this process ahead of time).
Very very wrong. The Fed's balance sheet is presented in this report and the $1.7 trillion of "Mortgage backed securities" on page 4 (page 12 of the pdf) is referring to so-called "conforming" mortgages backed by the US Government agencies (e.g. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). These are not the "toxic" mortgages issued between 2005-2007 to "sanitation engineers" in Riverside, California who claimed to make $150,000 and got mortgages of $500,000 on a run down shack, but rather, loans of about $230,000 to borrowers who can fully document income.
If you are referring to the true bailout programs such as Maiden Lane note that those were much smaller and have almost entirely wound down at this point.
I have been following a bunch of the links but can't actually find what consideration Verizon got in the contract. But I did see that the contract is called a "franchise agreement" so I'm assuming that the city offered to use its power to prevent anyone else from competing with Verizon in exchange for Verizon agreeing to, among other things, provide service to the entire city. And now the city is shocked, shocked that a company that is too lazy to want to compete is also too lazy to actually provide the service. Frog, meet scorpion...
Maybe next time the city will not offer any franchises and instead point out to Google what a great place NYC is to lay fiber. If Verizon still doesn't do a good job then they won't get the customers, Google will.
Good point - you are exactly the kind of person that I am thinking about. Rather than merely restricting my comment to "technical training" I really meant "institutional backing" in a broad sense which would include training, support, and generally advocating for programming technologies other than Excel.
I can't really blame IT for their stance, though, because if anything did ever go wrong it would be their problem and they would catch the blame. So the push has to come from management, who recognize that telling analysts that they can't use, say, R, is just making them do whatever they are trying to do in an operationally risky, non-auditable excel spreadsheet.
I forgot who said it, but there is a quote that goes something like "In every sufficiently large Excel spreadsheet, there is a half-assed implementation of a Lisp interpreter." So I agree that the problem isn't semi-skilled people doing programming (loosely defined), but rather, people semi-skilled in the wrong tool.
Many of those large spreadsheets would be much better off as a database and a little bit of scripting language like Python. But most of these business analysts have only ever had exposure to Excel and VBA, and they would have been much better served with some technical training in the right tool for the job.
Slashdot Mirror
That's okay, we make up for it at the refinery and drilling platforms.
Only if you know that the charging station isn't getting its electricity from coal or gas, like almost 70% of electricity generated in the US.
The only thing impeding electrics is politics
The two things impeding electrics are politics and battery size/weight to storage ratio. No wait...
The three things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, and the high cost of solar power. Umm...
The four things impeding electrics are politics, battery size/weight to storage ratio, the high cost of solar power, and the fear of nuclear power
Amongst the things impeding electrics...
It's like the original iPod. The original slashdot review was right - No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Where it was wrong, and why the iPod won, was because you could buy music in iTunes and you couldn't do that with other mp3 players. In the same way, the technology that beats ICE will not necessarily be faster, or cheaper, but rather, will have some other benefit that ICE can't compete with. Lots of people here are saying they can't wait for autonomous vehicles - I would agree that is a game breaker that will disrupt individual car ownership/commuting.
If you ask me, soon all cars will become basically plug-in hybrids, to take advantage of regenerative braking and high torque of electric, with petrol to deal with range anxiety (even more than actual range problems).
cleaner (in all senses)
Some PZEV ICE's have emissions that are cleaner than the outside air. A modern electric scores a lot of points against an 80's k car but the quality of an ICE is a moving target.
If past technological jumps can serve as a guide, the big switch to electric will occur, if at all, not because the new technology beats the old technology in things that the old technology is working on as well, because new technologies almost never can catch up to the benefits of an old technolody. But rather, it will occur when the new technology does something that the old technology doesn't do at all, not even poorly. I'm not sure what that is yet, but if electric car advocates are waiting for electric vehicles to catch up and surpass ICE, they might have a long wait
your daughter should better learn to find out and fight back for herself.
And the best way to teach kids is to show them, just like this father was doing.
In theory, yes, the ref announces, say, "3 minutes", and the game is supposed to end in 3 minutes, but that is just an approximation. It is generally understood that if the "real" stoppage time was 3 minutes, 10 seconds, but one team is in the middle of an attack at 3 minutes, 9 seconds, the ref will let the series play out before blowing the whistle.
The evidence is the disproportionately large number of games with a game winning goal in stoppage time, which end a second or two after the ball is inbounded again. And the infrequency (like, never) of a theoretical "buzzer beater" that was kicked before the whistle blows and then disallowed because the ref blew the whistle ending the game while the ball was in-flight.
This. If baseball wanted to have a set strike zone, they would have invented some kind of moveable net like device like a goal. But the human element is a big part of the sport. There is an aesthetic quality that is essential in most sports that defies simple mechanization, and in baseball, that is the strike zone. In basketball, it is the little travel before a nice dunk, and in soccer, it is the amount of stoppage time. If every travel was rigidly called, or if a soccer game stopped at exactly the correct time, even in the middle of good possession, these sports would be worse off.
It's the Commerce Clause, of course.
Poe's law disclaimer: I'm joking, I think...
The question isn't what I think *should* be, it's what I think about what they already *did*. Of course I think that banks should have to encrypt data over their website. And I would support regulation that requires it, and enforcement of that regulation. But not holding them responsible for something that wasn't in the rules when they did it.
Further, there is a big difference between being able to sniff packets in the clear and reverse-engineering a car's ROM. How perfect does a car's system have to be before you don't fault them? No system will ever be unhackable, so when whatever system they use gets hacked, are they always going to be held responsible in hindsight in your eyes?
If a carmaker builds a car that explodes in a normal accident, then they are negligent. But if they build a car that explodes when someone fires an RPG at it, I don't blame the automaker.
The kind of hack that takes control of a car and disables the brakes is not an accident. It is like someone cutting the brake lines. And we don't require car manufacturers to make brake lines out of triply reinforced kevlar and steel so that people can't maliciously cut through them, nor require automakers to wrap the car in fireproof material in case somebody douses it in gasoline and sets fire to it. They just need to be enough to make it through standard operating conditions, not outright attacks.
There will always be security holes as long as there is enough reason for someone to want to take control of a car. So although I think it is a good idea for carmakers to build better systems ("Mercedes Benz - the only luxury car that isn't affected by the ZeusMobile trojan!"), I think assigning liability in hindsight is a bit harsh. But some additional regulations that require some of the obvious best practices (air-gapped systems, etc) would also make sense.
The points that you (and AC) raise are legitimate concerns, and the way that they have been addressed is by giving ex ante review by the courts on probable cause and ex post review as to the admissibility of the evidence. Of course one can always say that these reviews are insufficient, but the whole point of a warrant is for the state to acquire specific evidence of a crime, and the proper time for the target to challenge it and have it reviewed is ex post. If targets were able to challenge warrants before they were executed it would give criminals plenty of opportunity to destroy evidence that they knew the government is looking for. And if you are saying that 2 judicial reviews are not sufficient to ensure justice for the accused, then why would 3 (including Facebook who at the end of the day doesn't care as much as you do) provide the standard of justice that you want?
Note that this is very different from a subpoena, which is what Facebook argued the warrant was really like. With a subpoena, the whole process is 2 sided, because the subpoena'd party is being asked to actually create evidence, such as answering questions in a deposition. So there is no fear that the evidence can be destroyed - it doesn't exist yet! However, actually getting the evidence that you want is, by its very nature, more difficult because it is not simply sitting on the floor of a garage or something.
But the important thing to point out is that it is much easier to serve somebody with a subpoena than it is to obtain a warrant. If Facebook had won, it would have meant that investigators would have had to prove the probable cause standard to obtain the warrant (like a warrant), then would have to fight to actually get the information (like a subpoena) which really doesn't make sense.
If you think that warrants don't currently provide sufficient protection for individuals, then you should provide those additional protections to all defendants, not just those whose potentially incriminating evidence is "on a computer." But before you say that you want targets to have their say before a warrant is executed, think hard about what that means for the man standing in the doorway, trying to read the warrant as the police show up at the door, trying to figure out what to do next. If he doesn't speak up, does he lose his right to object to the warrant at trial? Does he have a time limit for how long he can review it? The fact that the target can't contest the warrant before it is served is actually a protection because it puts the review in the correct place - in a courtroom in the bright light of day instead of a traffic stop or a sidewalk pat down.
Fourth Amendment:
[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This is not something new at all, and not at all at odds with the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment protects you from "unreasonable searches" - not *all* searches, and they can't issue the warrant in the first place without probable cause (as determined by a judge who signs the warrant). Lastly, the place to be searched (Facebook) and the things to be seized (photos and comments) are well specified. Where is the 4th amendment violation?
If you lived at any time since the founding of this great Republic, and stole your neighbor's pig and ate half of it, then hid the leftovers at a friend's house, then the authorities could search your friend's house looking for the the remaining bacon, even though you did the crime and it is your neighbor's property that is being searched. Just because your friend's house is now "on a computer" and the incriminating evidence is a photograph instead of a pig doesn't change any of that logic.
This case has nothing to do with "nonsensical legislation." It is straightforward rules of evidence and criminal procedure. The judge didn't say the warrant was OK, she just said that:
1) an invalid warrant "on a computer" is the same as an invalid warrant i.r.l. Meaning that a properly issued warrant gets served, then the thing the prosecutor wants to search gets searched, then if the defendant has reason to believe that the warrant was improperly issued or the search was done improperly, then those issues get brought up at trial to determine the admissibility of the evidence obtained from the search. It's what you see in courtroom dramas when evidence gets thrown out at trial - note that it is getting thrown out at trial, not being prevented from being found in the first place.
2) Even if the warrant was improper, Facebook isn't the defendant here and isn't the right person to challenge it anyways. Let's say the prosecutors suspect that you used rat poison bought at the local mom & pop general store to poison somebody. And the mom & pop store doesn't have any computers - you paid cash and they just took an old fashioned carbon copy imprint of your credit card. So they get a warrant to go through all those paper receipts to prove that you bought the rat poison. The mom & pop store isn't in the position to challenge that warrant, only you are. This case with Facebook is the same thing just "on a computer"
If we want to hold that "on a computer" isn't anything unique or different for patent purposes, we can't argue that "on a computer" has a different meaning for rules of evidence in a criminal proceeding.
Any time you have an in-group/out-group dynamic, you have to be careful that it doesn't turn into one of the many times in human history when that becomes a source of unspeakable pain and suffering. Snubbing the contributions of other nations in the control room paid for by American taxpayers by employees whose paychecks are paid by American taxpayers is not really comparable to, say, African colonization or the First World War. Maybe you can hope that humans stop seeing some people as part of their group and other as not part of that group, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Since that way of viewing the world seems to be hard wired into humanity, I think it is great when it gets channeled into increasing human knowledge, or even scoring more goals than the guys in the red jerseys, rather than "let's slaughter them because they talk funny."
I'm not sure I understand how "surge pricing" will increase drunk driving fatalities. I guess you are thinking that someone gets out of a bar to go home, and because surge pricing is too expensive, they drive home themselves instead of calling a cab/Uber (or instead of someone else setting one up for them). But the limitation on the availability of cabs is because there are more people looking for cabs than there are cabs on the street. Surge pricing brings more cabs out on the street, since supply curves slope upwards. With more cabs on the street, there are more drunk people getting rides home. You can't have a scenario where surge pricing is in effect because there is a lot of demand for cabs, and at the same time, having less people using cabs.
I'm not sure that is what is happening here. It seems reasonable that a rocket owner will refuse to take liability for the stuff on the rocket, since a rocket blowing up is not uncommon. So they basically say, "you can send stuff on our rocket at your own risk." Maybe the satellite owner should go out and buy insurance, but if it was up to the rocket owner to buy the insurance they would just pass that exact cost on to the payload owner (making the payload owner pay for the insurance indirectly).
So the question is, if a Boeing (or whatever) satellite was destroyed on a NASA rocket that blew up, did NASA reimburse Boeing for the damages, or was it the same as here? And then, if it is always the payload owner who bears the risk, should the US government buy insurance? I think the answer to that is no, since the cost of insurance will have to be greater than the expected cost of actual losses in the long run, and the government can afford to self-insure in this case.
I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but you can't compare the United States today to China today. China is undergoing one of the world's largest mass migrations in the history of the world, as it has gone from about 30% urban to 50% urban in just about 10 years. The US has been about 3/4 urbanized for the last 40 years. So China needs new buildings because people are moving to new places. In the US, cities just aren't growing as fast.
For example, everybody has heard of how difficult it is to find a place to live in San Francisco (or how expensive it is) because of the lack of new building and the large influx of new people. But San Francisco is only growing about 10,000 people per year. In China, many cities are growing at 10 or 50 *times* that amount. Without building lots of excess capacity (that is quickly used up) they could never keep pace.
Sure those sites will be offline, but just as you can get to the next floor on a stopped escalator, you can communicate with anybody in the world on an internet without facebook and twitter. You just have to put forth a little more effort than just standing there.
Speaking of Die Hard and "key sites" like facebook, one of my favorite scenes in any movie is in the first Die Hard when the terrorists shut down the building, there are a bunch of cut scenes to big locks engaging and the building going into lockdown. However, one of those scenes is a very dramatic shot of the escalators stopping. Because of course that would prevent anybody from getting to the next level of the building. Similarly, if Facebook and Twitter were shut down, only the totally clueless would be hindered in any meaningful way.
Facebook and Twitter - the escalators of the internet.
The whole "Chinese ghost city" bubble tends to be misunderstood. Sure there are boondoggles in Mongolia but a lot of those ghost cities are basically extensions of boomtowns. And it is tough for people to understand just how big a boomtown in China is; Shenzen is adding almost 300,000 people every year, Tianjin almost 600,000. So the general area of Shenzen needs to build a city the size of Pittsbugh, and Tianjin needs to build a city the size of Boston *every year*. Most of those empty cities were built in anticipation of people relocating from elsewhere and have filled up quickly. And for those that haven't, with building on that massive a scale, if they build residences for an extra 100,000 people in the wrong place here and there it's hardly a sign of foolhardy building that isn't necessary *somewhere*.
You are confusing money, value, creation, and notional. Not everything that has value is money. And the notional of derivative contracts is not the same as its value. If we make a bet on a coin toss for $100, we have created $100 of notional, not of value, and we have certainly not created $100 of money.
The real Greek position, which no one will say in public because there is too much national pride at stake, is that the bankers (i.e. Germany) *should* give handouts to Greece on a moral basis. Germany doesn't have any particular obligation to, say, New Zealand, and so the idea of German taxpayers shoveling a bunch of Euros to the Kiwis each month is kind of ridiculous. But for completely non-economic reasons, the "European Core" such as Germany and France *want* Greece and other poorer, less productive countries (like Portugal) to be part of the "European Project." Greece does not have the resources, such as a highly productive, skilled, and educated populace that Germany and France do, so Greece does not naturally fit with Germany and France and that is the source of the disagreement.
Germany then says, "If you cut your pensions, reduce corruption, and collect taxes you will be more like Germany and then we will all fit together."
But Greece says, "That may help in the long run but 1, if you want us in your project so badly then you must give us financial support (handouts) in the form of fiscal transfers, and 2, we are Greece and don't want to be Germany."
So they all kind of want to stay together, but Greece wants a monetary and fiscal policy that enables them to maintain a high standard of living, while Germany wants every country to be rich so that changes to monetary and fiscal policy are unnecessary.
In all fairness, the reason why this is such a mess is because the Greeks can't file bankruptcy. The only reason we in America can "file bankruptcy" is because there is a law (with sections like "Chapter 11" and "Chapter 13" which is where those terms come from) that we can take advantage of that forces creditors to accept certain kinds of debt restructurings, where creditors generally will incur some loss and the debtor will generally have to fulfill some kinds of restrictive conditions. Because these laws are already on the books, when someone (or a company) gets into trouble, there is an established legal process that tells the borrower what to do so that they can "move on."
But there is no "International Bankruptcy Court." Let's say Greece tries to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York City and a court there says, "according to our laws, Greece has to do x, y, and z, and give the proceeds to your creditors. And creditors, in exchange, you no longer have a claim against the government or people of Greece," but there is no reason why the European institutions that are owed money would have to listen to the U.S. court. So instead, they are trying to make up a bankruptcy process as they go along, which is going to seem ad hoc (because it is) and potentially arbitrary and unfair (because no one agreed to this process ahead of time).
Very very wrong. The Fed's balance sheet is presented in this report and the $1.7 trillion of "Mortgage backed securities" on page 4 (page 12 of the pdf) is referring to so-called "conforming" mortgages backed by the US Government agencies (e.g. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). These are not the "toxic" mortgages issued between 2005-2007 to "sanitation engineers" in Riverside, California who claimed to make $150,000 and got mortgages of $500,000 on a run down shack, but rather, loans of about $230,000 to borrowers who can fully document income.
If you are referring to the true bailout programs such as Maiden Lane note that those were much smaller and have almost entirely wound down at this point.
I have been following a bunch of the links but can't actually find what consideration Verizon got in the contract. But I did see that the contract is called a "franchise agreement" so I'm assuming that the city offered to use its power to prevent anyone else from competing with Verizon in exchange for Verizon agreeing to, among other things, provide service to the entire city. And now the city is shocked, shocked that a company that is too lazy to want to compete is also too lazy to actually provide the service. Frog, meet scorpion...
Maybe next time the city will not offer any franchises and instead point out to Google what a great place NYC is to lay fiber. If Verizon still doesn't do a good job then they won't get the customers, Google will.
Good point - you are exactly the kind of person that I am thinking about. Rather than merely restricting my comment to "technical training" I really meant "institutional backing" in a broad sense which would include training, support, and generally advocating for programming technologies other than Excel.
I can't really blame IT for their stance, though, because if anything did ever go wrong it would be their problem and they would catch the blame. So the push has to come from management, who recognize that telling analysts that they can't use, say, R, is just making them do whatever they are trying to do in an operationally risky, non-auditable excel spreadsheet.
I forgot who said it, but there is a quote that goes something like "In every sufficiently large Excel spreadsheet, there is a half-assed implementation of a Lisp interpreter." So I agree that the problem isn't semi-skilled people doing programming (loosely defined), but rather, people semi-skilled in the wrong tool.
Many of those large spreadsheets would be much better off as a database and a little bit of scripting language like Python. But most of these business analysts have only ever had exposure to Excel and VBA, and they would have been much better served with some technical training in the right tool for the job.