1) False match. 2) Carried in by animals, insects, etc. 3) On the sole of someone's shoe. 4) From dumpster-diving. 5) Planted, by cops or others.
I could go on all day.
How is that different than near-sighted and/or racist eye-witnesses, and jail-house snitches? Not really different. The only difference is tv show like CSI that "glorify" DNA evidence and vilify other forms of circumstantial evidence.
I think fragmentation is the biggest cause of fake news. When there were only a few viable news sources, they had to cater to everyone so stores were less biases and fact checking more rigorous. But if you can be a viable news source that only targets to a fraction of people who are predisposed to be less critical of you, you leave the door wide open to fake stories because the penalty for a fake story is nearly non-existent (you will be likely forgiven by your audience).
Basically you can be viable news source on the internet by having the reporting ethics of a typewritten conspiracy newsletter of the 1960s distributed by post with no return address...
Ask a paleoanthropologist and they will tell you that you are full of shit about the lifespan of early humans.
One issue that may be of interest is fossil records show many examples of humans and neaderthals and analysis shows that many were likely to have died at an older age due the observation of common age related dental issues (such as ground-down and missing teeth) and arthritis. Unfortunately fossil records are rare so it isn't possible to determine the average age related issues, and even if there were many more fossil records, they cannot determine cancers or cardiovascular issues from fossil remains.
As mentioned by other posters, refined sugar and other refined carbs have been identified as a likely candidate (potentially more significant than saturated fats from meat) for many of these diseases, but the jury is current out on that topic.
The reason prehistoric man was attributed with short life-expectancy was because of high infant mortality and childhood deaths (disease and other mortality risks). If we factor those things out, prehistoric man is estimated to have lifetimes similar to those in the 16th century humans. These extrapolations were done by a few decades ago in scientific studies of isolated hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and South America before there was significant contact between these isolated groups and modern society (unfortunately that they are difficult if not impossible to repeat now because of widespread cultural contamination).
You can take these with a few grains of salt, but it tracks with estimates done over historical times (where they have better information) that factoring out infant/child mortality effects, the lifespan of humans has been pretty constant until the industrial revolution when people started living a bit longer. Post-childhood causes of deaths that limit life-expectancy have changed greatly over time. In the hunter-gatherer society external injuries dominated the deaths, in the agricultural society the prevalence of infectious diseases dominated, it wasn't until the industrial revolution that cardiovascular diseases dominated, but as we move to a "high-tech" society cancers now dominate over cardio-vascular disease.
Since our diets have changed since the earlier part of the industrial revolution, I don't think we are eating *less* meat than we were before during the industrial revolution (where we were collectively much poor-er and couldn't afford much meat) so I'm not so sure it is conclusive that meat is the cause of all this cardio-vascular disease during the industrial revolution, and I'm not sure it's a cause of the current cancer epidemic either. Personally, I suspect generally higher calorie diets and less exercise for cardio-vascular disease prevalence and prior-generational under-reporting combined with increased industrial pollution for the modern cancer prevalence. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect many will agree with that assessment.
Fucking cows are polluting the planet. Acid rain and global warming and turning forests into wasteland. I say we kill and eat those fuckers! Way ahead of you... pass the steak sauce.
Let's wait for the seaweed feed. Then we can have discount surf-and-turf AND save the environment** all at the same time... Gotta love science!
So should a person be prosecuted for one hair follicle considering http://www.webmd.com/skin-prob.... Keep in mind that means 365,000 per year you scatter around for which you are now legally liable. So exactly for how long can DNA be recovered from a hair follicle, after you lose it.
I blame this on tv shows like CSI.
DNA is great circumstantial evidence for falsifying an alibi (e.g., I never saw that person, so how did your dna get in the house?). As for proving something specific happened, it of course doesn't do shit, but then again people are convicted by dubious circumstantial evidence all the time (e.g, eye witness testimony) so in the bigger scheme of things, it isn't that different.
Maybe when it is relativistically heavy enough it can no longer accelerate?
Relativity doesn't stop you gaining momentum. You can still accelerate, your speed will asymptotically tend to c, and your mass will increase, but you never stop. Besides, it's relativity so it has to be realtive to something.
FWIW, it think it's generally better to think of your mass not actually increasing, but simply your momentum. The "fiction" of the mass increase is only to preserve the newtonian idea of F=ma, but if you instead think of this law as F=dp/dt, you never have to wonder where that extra mass came from (as a bonus this also works in the 4-vector space that makes it easier to compute relativistic relationships)...
What are you talking about? The first nuclear weapons used fuel enriched by magnetic separation. There was no need for a nuclear reactor.
The first bomb "trinity" was plutonium (as was the later "fat-man" bomb). Plutonium being not naturally occuring was produced in the Oakridge reactor and was enriched by chemical means...
The "little-boy" bomb was U235 and mostly enriched using magnetic separation, but due to the limited amount of naturally occurring U235, production had to be augmented by gas diffusion plant to produce sufficient material in the required time.
Umm, you realize we needed to make nuclear power plants *before* we could make the bombs, right? Granted they were designed specifically to enrich the natural fissiles into weapons-grade isotopes, but the reactors still came first.
The first time electricity was generated from a nuclear reactor was in 1951.
The first nuclear reactor that generated electricity was built in Chicago in 1942.
Of course it didn't generate much electricity (~200W), but it technically was a nuclear powered electricity generator. As it was not shielded and constituted a radiation hazard, they didn't want it to generate too much power. For most experiments they typically ran at only 0.5W... Baby steps...
They pay taxes on all income earned in the US to the IRS. Minus deductions and stuff. What the fuck does that have to do with where the phone is manufactured?
Not exactly, companies pay taxes on their profit = revenue - expenses. By "purchasing" the goods and/or the "license" to sell those goods from an offshore entity at an inflated rate, they effectively increase their expenses to hide their revenue lowering their realized USA profits and the amount of taxes they pay.
If the "offshore" entity that made the good and/or received the licensing revenue was actually *on* USA shores, those expenses would be paid to a USA company which would show a profit and have to pay the appropriate taxes in the USA instead of the "offshore" country...
... and what did Carrie Fisher do after Harrison Ford? Or rather whom?
I bet he's feeling embarrassed right about now.
I think Carrie Fisher dated Paul Simon soon after that... I believe the aftermath of that marriage inspired his song "She Moved On" and probably a few more on the Graceland album...
Oh yeah and I think she was also engaged to Dan Akroyd, before marrying her gay husband (whom later divorced her so he could marry his boyfriend)...
Really? I'd say the vast majority of the cars I see at the drag strip are carburated. I think some of them might even win races.
That's mostly because it's easier to tune a carb than to rewrite the EFI software for a custom engine config, especially if you are only running it full throttle on a drag strip. They probably also want to mimic the Nascar circuit that require carbs (as part of the rules, ironically along with restrictor plates to limit speed/power) which is in deference to their hardcore audience, although other circuits use EFI...
However, if the rules allowed it, and a drag racing team had the expertise to design their own EFI and the corresponding software for their engine, I'm pretty sure they would eventually get good enough to beat the pants off a carburetor, but suffer the wrath of the purists...
And very obviously so. I don't know how anyone with half a brain would mistake it for a reputable news site.
Which goes to show that a page ranking system based on counting the quality and links a site has doesn't mean it is anything other than that.
If you want pages ranked for some other criteria, you have to design for it. Given many people seek out views that confirm their own views of the world, there's no reason to doubt that the material on this site was "authoritative" (given some definitions of that word), to many of the people that searched for that information.
Authoritative doesn't necessarily mean accurate, it simply means trusted and respected...
All over Asia these days. The pricest components, eg SoC, RAM, and storage, are fabbed somewhere in Asia, if I recall the location of TSMCs foundries correctly.
SoC are mostly fabbed in Taiwan RAM is mostly fabbed in Korea and Malaysia
TSMC has some fabs in china through SMIC "investment", but none are leading edge (which is needed for advanced smartphones).
Although many folks think all trade is bad, mostly Trump has been talking about punishing a currency manipulator: which is basically China, not Taiwan nor Korea (at least recently, although they have both done so in the past).
Fun fact: nearly all Android phones are made in places just like China...
But please continue.
In other news, that is curious that the Chinese would call out the iPhone, since a few of their own corporations make some not-insubstantial cash from manufacturing the things...
True, but the iPhone's prime contractor happens to be Foxconn which is technically a Taiwanese company. Relations aren't great between Taiwan and China at the current time (due to the election of a pro-independence President in Taiwan).
Of course many of the subcontractors are Chinese companies and they would be of course be impacted...
Do you know what happens when upstream nations dam them and keep all the water? Usually the dam gets bombed.
Quick fact, In 1934, Arizona called the state National Guard and militia units to the California border to protest the construction of Parker Dam and California's diversions from the Colorado River. For a few days, the "Arizona Navy" patrolled the river...
You are confusing the state budget with the ratio of federal taxes and money received back from the feds - they are quite different things
California's budget is deeply hamstrung by Regan era meddling that makes hard to raise money for simple things like schools - it's the main reason why the state's schools used to be rated #1 in the nation and are now at the bottom
Crazy fact, Prop 13 (which capped the property tax growth which hamstrung tax revenues for schools) was passed back in 1973 when Jerry Brown was Governor Moonbeam for the first time...
Although Jerry Brown was originally against Prop 13, he flopped and Howard Jarvis (the author of Prop13) eventually supported Jerry Brown's re-election campaign back in the day... Now days Jerry Brown considers Prop13 the 3rd rail of California politics...
You are confusing the state budget with the ratio of federal taxes and money received back from the feds - they are quite different things
California's budget is deeply hamstrung by Regan era meddling that makes hard to raise money for simple things like schools - it's the main reason why the state's schools used to be rated #1 in the nation and are now at the bottom
Crazy fact, Prop 13 (which capped the property tax growth which hamstrung tax revenues for schools) was passed back in 1973 when Jerry Brown was Governor Moonbeam for the first time...
Although Jerry Brown was originally against Prop 13, he flopped and Howard Jarvis (the author of Prop13) eventually supported Jerry Brown's re-election campaign back in the day... Now days Jerry Brown considers Prop13 the 3rd rail of California politics...
Please get your geography straight, the Rockies (where the Colorado River originates and which supplies southern california with more than 1/2 of their water) are *NOT* in California. You are confusing the Rockies with the Sierras...
Um, California doesnt really get water from outside the state to any great degree. It's the California part of the Rockies that provides the snow pack that feeds the water needs of Southern California and the Valley. The rest of the state makes due with its own reservoirs.
I think you need a geography lesson. As far as the maps I'm aware of, no part of the Rockies where the Colorado river originates are within the borders of California.
AFAIK, In Northern California most of the water comes from Sierra Nevada range. In the central valley, about 1/2 comes from the Sierra Nevada and another 1/2 from underground aquifers. Unfortunately for Southern California, most of their water comes from the Colorado River.
I used to live in CO, and the issues surrounding the Colorado River Pact of 1922 continues to be a *major* political issue in Colorado. Over the last 50 years, California has been using more that its allocated portion of water (which is allowed by the pact when there is a surplus), but California has also been using its influence in congress to block other states from creating reservoirs to capture surplus for drought years. Sometimes in drought years can get pretty acrimonious, and agriculture concerns in Colorado call out California for conspiring to steal water by blocking reservoir projects.
If CA were to secede, I'm sure northern CA would be fine, but I suspect southern CA would need to get major concessions to get the "bonus" water they have been relying on from the Colorado river basin.
The state of West Virginia (aka Kanawha), was formed when Virginia seceded from the union prior to the Civil war. During that time there were 2 legislatures that claimed to represent all of Virginia. The legislature that didn't support succession voted to approve to split the state and this was approved by the US Congress compliant with Article 4 of the constitution.
In the case of California, I don't think the legislators that represent the central counties in the CA state legislature, nor do I think the US Congress would approve splitting the state. This comes up in Texas all the time, and the same thing is likely the limiting factor. In any case, it seems totally unlikely that the Congressional representatives of small states would ever agree to splitting a large state to help it gain more representatives in the Senate.
I'd like to see a CEO-less company. As well as HR-less. Why does automation always get rid of OUR jobs, never theirs?
There are already many CEO-less companies (e.g., run by committee like DPR construction, Abercrombie & Fitch two >$1B companies) and even more HR-less companies (many smaller companies totally outsource HR). There are even a couple companies where you can even outsource the CEO position.
Back in the day people thought the earth was flat, and if you thought otherwise you were a heretic and got burned/hanged/drowned/head chopped off/etc, and see, now we do know the world is round.. There is still a lot we don't know..
Although I agree there is still a lot we don't know, I'm tired of all this talk about people thinking the earth was flat in the middle ages.
Since the days of the early greek philosophers (~500BC), if not earlier, basically all learned folks believed the earth was round. After this time, the only remaining folks that though the earth was flat were literary figures that popularized their works as metaphors for the conflict between religion and science. The conflict with the church that many refer to was the conflict between a geocentric vs heliocentric universe, not that the earth was flat which nobody believed.
I explained what UBI is, modern day Communism as it will inevitably lead to nationalization of private property and of-course as all forms of collectivism will crash both, individual rights and the economy.
Except it's not. It's a re-jig of the current welfare state system. If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent during the tricky early stages of the business.
As if people taking excessive risk is always a good thing.
At some point if you socialize all loss potential, you get too big to fail, and potentially non-optimal use of resources (e.g., 100' s of companies doing something in an area where the market can only support a few), so there is definitely a cross over point somewhere. I don't think anyone knows where that is, but it isn't at the zero risk point.
You might argue that at any specific point in time, the economy might benefit on the margin for a few more startups, but as we can see from history the current system continually business cycles from a few startups where you get fewer winners (dot-com) that stimulates a time of startup oversaturation and lots of failures and retrenching (e.g., dot-bust). Thus we have crossed whatever that optimal point is many, many times and overshot both ways. Don't really see how "stimulating" the creation of even more startups is ever a good idea economically in the long run as it will probably only increase this (in frequency or magnitude). It might "feel" like that is a good thing if you are some hot-shot young engineer that hasn't put down any roots yet, but other sectors of the economy (and real lives) can get disrupted by these inevitable cycles.
There might be some other social benefits of UBI, but if we could *DISCOURAGE* the use of UBI to support more startups, then I would be more amenable to it.
My new found albeit limited experience dealing with vendors and supply chains is that an awful lot of them seem to regard money as a messy technicality required in order to keep making their widgets.
Your experience is mighty limited. Those vendors that don't watch their bottom line generally get replaced by upstarts during the next technology upgrade cycle. Most vendors that survived 4-5 decades tend to watch their bottom lines very carefully so they can start selling new things as soon as they see a windows to make back their investment and only sell buggy-whips as long as they are making reasonable net returns and they often simply leave it to other companies...
TI doesn't make 74xx series chips anymore. Intel doesn't fab dram anymore. Vishay doesn't roll high precision foil resistors anymore...
I think you misunderstand supply. There isn't a supply of billions of CEOs that will work for a $1. There is a supply of a several thousand (or so), the others are more-or-less "unqualified" (not that they can't do a similar job, but they are unhireable because the boards of directors don't want to get in trouble for hiring outside the expected hiring pool). Similarly there isn't a supply of billions of IT folks, and similarly hiring managers generaly don't want to get in trouble by going outside the "standard" hiring pool. This used to be called nobody got fired for buying IBM (but that probably goes the other way these days)...
The problem is that there is probably no good way to evaluate employees (including CEOs) before hiring, so most people simply pay the going rate, and hope for the best. The going rate is set by the limited supply and how desperate companies are (e.g., the demand side). The outsourcing comes in when the demand at the lower price point exceeds the supply and gets supplanted by a demand at a lower price point (and potentially larger quality variance) which matches the supply.
This used to be called the resistor tolerance dilemma. 1% tolerance resistors are much more expensive than 20% tolerance resistors. You might think if you bought enough 20% resistors you could cherry pick the ones that had lower tolerance, but in reality, the vendor pre-sorted for this, so if you bought the cheaper resistors you could almost guarantee they were crap. However, it was reasoned that by sophisticated design choices you could theoretically reduce the problem of high variance resistors so people started doing that. So you could solve your circuit design problem with a simpler scheme, but pay more for resistors, or have a more complicated circuit (with more things to manage that could go wrong) but get it done with cheaper resistors.
As expected, managers in 2nd rate companies didn't grasp this inherent tradeoff and wanted both cheaper resistors and the simpler circuits designed by novice designers. They bought loads of cheap resistors and put them in these simple circuits as a cost cutting move expecting the distribution of resistors to have normal statistical characteristics. Lo-and-behold they would eventually get a batch of resistors that were all low by 15% resulting in a 100% escape rate from their production line.
Slashdot Mirror
How did your DNA get in the house? Really?
1) False match.
2) Carried in by animals, insects, etc.
3) On the sole of someone's shoe.
4) From dumpster-diving.
5) Planted, by cops or others.
I could go on all day.
How is that different than near-sighted and/or racist eye-witnesses, and jail-house snitches? Not really different. The only difference is tv show like CSI that "glorify" DNA evidence and vilify other forms of circumstantial evidence.
I think fragmentation is the biggest cause of fake news. When there were only a few viable news sources, they had to cater to everyone so stores were less biases and fact checking more rigorous. But if you can be a viable news source that only targets to a fraction of people who are predisposed to be less critical of you, you leave the door wide open to fake stories because the penalty for a fake story is nearly non-existent (you will be likely forgiven by your audience).
Basically you can be viable news source on the internet by having the reporting ethics of a typewritten conspiracy newsletter of the 1960s distributed by post with no return address...
Ask a paleoanthropologist and they will tell you that you are full of shit about the lifespan of early humans.
One issue that may be of interest is fossil records show many examples of humans and neaderthals and analysis shows that many were likely to have died at an older age due the observation of common age related dental issues (such as ground-down and missing teeth) and arthritis. Unfortunately fossil records are rare so it isn't possible to determine the average age related issues, and even if there were many more fossil records, they cannot determine cancers or cardiovascular issues from fossil remains.
As mentioned by other posters, refined sugar and other refined carbs have been identified as a likely candidate (potentially more significant than saturated fats from meat) for many of these diseases, but the jury is current out on that topic.
The reason prehistoric man was attributed with short life-expectancy was because of high infant mortality and childhood deaths (disease and other mortality risks). If we factor those things out, prehistoric man is estimated to have lifetimes similar to those in the 16th century humans. These extrapolations were done by a few decades ago in scientific studies of isolated hunter-gatherer societies in Africa and South America before there was significant contact between these isolated groups and modern society (unfortunately that they are difficult if not impossible to repeat now because of widespread cultural contamination).
You can take these with a few grains of salt, but it tracks with estimates done over historical times (where they have better information) that factoring out infant/child mortality effects, the lifespan of humans has been pretty constant until the industrial revolution when people started living a bit longer. Post-childhood causes of deaths that limit life-expectancy have changed greatly over time. In the hunter-gatherer society external injuries dominated the deaths, in the agricultural society the prevalence of infectious diseases dominated, it wasn't until the industrial revolution that cardiovascular diseases dominated, but as we move to a "high-tech" society cancers now dominate over cardio-vascular disease.
Since our diets have changed since the earlier part of the industrial revolution, I don't think we are eating *less* meat than we were before during the industrial revolution (where we were collectively much poor-er and couldn't afford much meat) so I'm not so sure it is conclusive that meat is the cause of all this cardio-vascular disease during the industrial revolution, and I'm not sure it's a cause of the current cancer epidemic either. Personally, I suspect generally higher calorie diets and less exercise for cardio-vascular disease prevalence and prior-generational under-reporting combined with increased industrial pollution for the modern cancer prevalence. I have no evidence to support this, but I suspect many will agree with that assessment.
Fucking cows are polluting the planet. Acid rain and global warming and turning forests into wasteland. I say we kill and eat those fuckers!
Way ahead of you... pass the steak sauce.
Let's wait for the seaweed feed. Then we can have discount surf-and-turf AND save the environment** all at the same time...
Gotta love science!
** it's a joke, just roll with it greenies...
So should a person be prosecuted for one hair follicle considering http://www.webmd.com/skin-prob.... Keep in mind that means 365,000 per year you scatter around for which you are now legally liable. So exactly for how long can DNA be recovered from a hair follicle, after you lose it.
I blame this on tv shows like CSI.
DNA is great circumstantial evidence for falsifying an alibi (e.g., I never saw that person, so how did your dna get in the house?). As for proving something specific happened, it of course doesn't do shit, but then again people are convicted by dubious circumstantial evidence all the time (e.g, eye witness testimony) so in the bigger scheme of things, it isn't that different.
Maybe when it is relativistically heavy enough it can no longer accelerate?
Relativity doesn't stop you gaining momentum. You can still accelerate, your speed will asymptotically tend to c, and your mass will increase, but you never stop. Besides, it's relativity so it has to be realtive to something.
FWIW, it think it's generally better to think of your mass not actually increasing, but simply your momentum. The "fiction" of the mass increase is only to preserve the newtonian idea of F=ma, but if you instead think of this law as F=dp/dt, you never have to wonder where that extra mass came from (as a bonus this also works in the 4-vector space that makes it easier to compute relativistic relationships)...
What are you talking about? The first nuclear weapons used fuel enriched by magnetic separation. There was no need for a nuclear reactor.
The first bomb "trinity" was plutonium (as was the later "fat-man" bomb). Plutonium being not naturally occuring was produced in the Oakridge reactor and was enriched by chemical means...
The "little-boy" bomb was U235 and mostly enriched using magnetic separation, but due to the limited amount of naturally occurring U235, production had to be augmented by gas diffusion plant to produce sufficient material in the required time.
Umm, you realize we needed to make nuclear power plants *before* we could make the bombs, right? Granted they were designed specifically to enrich the natural fissiles into weapons-grade isotopes, but the reactors still came first.
The first time electricity was generated from a nuclear reactor was in 1951.
The first nuclear reactor that generated electricity was built in Chicago in 1942.
Of course it didn't generate much electricity (~200W), but it technically was a nuclear powered electricity generator. As it was not shielded and constituted a radiation hazard, they didn't want it to generate too much power. For most experiments they typically ran at only 0.5W... Baby steps...
They pay taxes on all income earned in the US to the IRS. Minus deductions and stuff. What the fuck does that have to do with where the phone is manufactured?
Not exactly, companies pay taxes on their profit = revenue - expenses. By "purchasing" the goods and/or the "license" to sell those goods from an offshore entity at an inflated rate, they effectively increase their expenses to hide their revenue lowering their realized USA profits and the amount of taxes they pay.
If the "offshore" entity that made the good and/or received the licensing revenue was actually *on* USA shores, those expenses would be paid to a USA company which would show a profit and have to pay the appropriate taxes in the USA instead of the "offshore" country...
... and what did Carrie Fisher do after Harrison Ford? Or rather whom?
I bet he's feeling embarrassed right about now.
I think Carrie Fisher dated Paul Simon soon after that...
I believe the aftermath of that marriage inspired his song "She Moved On" and probably a few more on the Graceland album...
Oh yeah and I think she was also engaged to Dan Akroyd, before marrying her gay husband (whom later divorced her so he could marry his boyfriend)...
Really? I'd say the vast majority of the cars I see at the drag strip are carburated. I think some of them might even win races.
That's mostly because it's easier to tune a carb than to rewrite the EFI software for a custom engine config, especially if you are only running it full throttle on a drag strip. They probably also want to mimic the Nascar circuit that require carbs (as part of the rules, ironically along with restrictor plates to limit speed/power) which is in deference to their hardcore audience, although other circuits use EFI...
However, if the rules allowed it, and a drag racing team had the expertise to design their own EFI and the corresponding software for their engine, I'm pretty sure they would eventually get good enough to beat the pants off a carburetor, but suffer the wrath of the purists...
And very obviously so. I don't know how anyone with half a brain would mistake it for a reputable news site.
Which goes to show that a page ranking system based on counting the quality and links a site has doesn't mean it is anything other than that.
If you want pages ranked for some other criteria, you have to design for it. Given many people seek out views that confirm their own views of the world, there's no reason to doubt that the material on this site was "authoritative" (given some definitions of that word), to many of the people that searched for that information.
Authoritative doesn't necessarily mean accurate, it simply means trusted and respected...
All over Asia these days. The pricest components, eg SoC, RAM, and storage, are fabbed somewhere in Asia, if I recall the location of TSMCs foundries correctly.
SoC are mostly fabbed in Taiwan
RAM is mostly fabbed in Korea and Malaysia
TSMC has some fabs in china through SMIC "investment", but none are leading edge (which is needed for advanced smartphones).
Although many folks think all trade is bad, mostly Trump has been talking about punishing a currency manipulator: which is basically China, not Taiwan nor Korea (at least recently, although they have both done so in the past).
Fun fact: nearly all Android phones are made in places just like China...
But please continue.
In other news, that is curious that the Chinese would call out the iPhone, since a few of their own corporations make some not-insubstantial cash from manufacturing the things...
True, but the iPhone's prime contractor happens to be Foxconn which is technically a Taiwanese company. Relations aren't great between Taiwan and China at the current time (due to the election of a pro-independence President in Taiwan).
Of course many of the subcontractors are Chinese companies and they would be of course be impacted...
Rivers flow between nations all over the world.
Do you know what happens when upstream nations dam them and keep all the water? Usually the dam gets bombed.
Quick fact, In 1934, Arizona called the state National Guard and militia units to the California border to protest the construction of Parker Dam and California's diversions from the Colorado River. For a few days, the "Arizona Navy" patrolled the river...
http://www.usbr.gov/lc/phoenix...
You are confusing the state budget with the ratio of federal taxes and money received back from the feds - they are quite different things
California's budget is deeply hamstrung by Regan era meddling that makes hard to raise money for simple things like schools - it's the main reason why the state's schools used to be rated #1 in the nation and are now at the bottom
Crazy fact, Prop 13 (which capped the property tax growth which hamstrung tax revenues for schools) was passed back in 1973 when Jerry Brown was Governor Moonbeam for the first time...
Although Jerry Brown was originally against Prop 13, he flopped and Howard Jarvis (the author of Prop13) eventually supported Jerry Brown's re-election campaign back in the day... Now days Jerry Brown considers Prop13 the 3rd rail of California politics...
You are confusing the state budget with the ratio of federal taxes and money received back from the feds - they are quite different things
California's budget is deeply hamstrung by Regan era meddling that makes hard to raise money for simple things like schools - it's the main reason why the state's schools used to be rated #1 in the nation and are now at the bottom
Crazy fact, Prop 13 (which capped the property tax growth which hamstrung tax revenues for schools) was passed back in 1973 when Jerry Brown was Governor Moonbeam for the first time...
Although Jerry Brown was originally against Prop 13, he flopped and Howard Jarvis (the author of Prop13) eventually supported Jerry Brown's re-election campaign back in the day... Now days Jerry Brown considers Prop13 the 3rd rail of California politics...
Please get your geography straight, the Rockies (where the Colorado River originates and which supplies southern california with more than 1/2 of their water) are *NOT* in California. You are confusing the Rockies with the Sierras...
Um, California doesnt really get water from outside the state to any great degree. It's the California part of the Rockies that provides the snow pack that feeds the water needs of Southern California and the Valley. The rest of the state makes due with its own reservoirs.
I think you need a geography lesson. As far as the maps I'm aware of, no part of the Rockies where the Colorado river originates are within the borders of California.
AFAIK, In Northern California most of the water comes from Sierra Nevada range. In the central valley, about 1/2 comes from the Sierra Nevada and another 1/2 from underground aquifers. Unfortunately for Southern California, most of their water comes from the Colorado River.
I used to live in CO, and the issues surrounding the Colorado River Pact of 1922 continues to be a *major* political issue in Colorado. Over the last 50 years, California has been using more that its allocated portion of water (which is allowed by the pact when there is a surplus), but California has also been using its influence in congress to block other states from creating reservoirs to capture surplus for drought years. Sometimes in drought years can get pretty acrimonious, and agriculture concerns in Colorado call out California for conspiring to steal water by blocking reservoir projects.
If CA were to secede, I'm sure northern CA would be fine, but I suspect southern CA would need to get major concessions to get the "bonus" water they have been relying on from the Colorado river basin.
I'm wondering then why we have West Virginia...
The state of West Virginia (aka Kanawha), was formed when Virginia seceded from the union prior to the Civil war. During that time there were 2 legislatures that claimed to represent all of Virginia. The legislature that didn't support succession voted to approve to split the state and this was approved by the US Congress compliant with Article 4 of the constitution.
In the case of California, I don't think the legislators that represent the central counties in the CA state legislature, nor do I think the US Congress would approve splitting the state. This comes up in Texas all the time, and the same thing is likely the limiting factor. In any case, it seems totally unlikely that the Congressional representatives of small states would ever agree to splitting a large state to help it gain more representatives in the Senate.
I'd like to see a CEO-less company. As well as HR-less. Why does automation always get rid of OUR jobs, never theirs?
There are already many CEO-less companies (e.g., run by committee like DPR construction, Abercrombie & Fitch two >$1B companies) and even more HR-less companies (many smaller companies totally outsource HR). There are even a couple companies where you can even outsource the CEO position.
Back in the day people thought the earth was flat, and if you thought otherwise you were a heretic and got burned/hanged/drowned/head chopped off/etc, and see, now we do know the world is round.. There is still a lot we don't know..
Although I agree there is still a lot we don't know, I'm tired of all this talk about people thinking the earth was flat in the middle ages.
Since the days of the early greek philosophers (~500BC), if not earlier, basically all learned folks believed the earth was round. After this time, the only remaining folks that though the earth was flat were literary figures that popularized their works as metaphors for the conflict between religion and science. The conflict with the church that many refer to was the conflict between a geocentric vs heliocentric universe, not that the earth was flat which nobody believed.
I explained what UBI is, modern day Communism as it will inevitably lead to nationalization of private property and of-course as all forms of collectivism will crash both, individual rights and the economy.
Except it's not. It's a re-jig of the current welfare state system. If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent during the tricky early stages of the business.
As if people taking excessive risk is always a good thing.
At some point if you socialize all loss potential, you get too big to fail, and potentially non-optimal use of resources (e.g., 100' s of companies doing something in an area where the market can only support a few), so there is definitely a cross over point somewhere. I don't think anyone knows where that is, but it isn't at the zero risk point.
You might argue that at any specific point in time, the economy might benefit on the margin for a few more startups, but as we can see from history the current system continually business cycles from a few startups where you get fewer winners (dot-com) that stimulates a time of startup oversaturation and lots of failures and retrenching (e.g., dot-bust). Thus we have crossed whatever that optimal point is many, many times and overshot both ways. Don't really see how "stimulating" the creation of even more startups is ever a good idea economically in the long run as it will probably only increase this (in frequency or magnitude). It might "feel" like that is a good thing if you are some hot-shot young engineer that hasn't put down any roots yet, but other sectors of the economy (and real lives) can get disrupted by these inevitable cycles.
There might be some other social benefits of UBI, but if we could *DISCOURAGE* the use of UBI to support more startups, then I would be more amenable to it.
My new found albeit limited experience dealing with vendors and supply chains is that an awful lot of them seem to regard money as a messy technicality required in order to keep making their widgets.
Your experience is mighty limited. Those vendors that don't watch their bottom line generally get replaced by upstarts during the next technology upgrade cycle. Most vendors that survived 4-5 decades tend to watch their bottom lines very carefully so they can start selling new things as soon as they see a windows to make back their investment and only sell buggy-whips as long as they are making reasonable net returns and they often simply leave it to other companies...
TI doesn't make 74xx series chips anymore. Intel doesn't fab dram anymore. Vishay doesn't roll high precision foil resistors anymore...
I think you misunderstand supply. There isn't a supply of billions of CEOs that will work for a $1. There is a supply of a several thousand (or so), the others are more-or-less "unqualified" (not that they can't do a similar job, but they are unhireable because the boards of directors don't want to get in trouble for hiring outside the expected hiring pool). Similarly there isn't a supply of billions of IT folks, and similarly hiring managers generaly don't want to get in trouble by going outside the "standard" hiring pool. This used to be called nobody got fired for buying IBM (but that probably goes the other way these days)...
The problem is that there is probably no good way to evaluate employees (including CEOs) before hiring, so most people simply pay the going rate, and hope for the best. The going rate is set by the limited supply and how desperate companies are (e.g., the demand side). The outsourcing comes in when the demand at the lower price point exceeds the supply and gets supplanted by a demand at a lower price point (and potentially larger quality variance) which matches the supply.
This used to be called the resistor tolerance dilemma. 1% tolerance resistors are much more expensive than 20% tolerance resistors. You might think if you bought enough 20% resistors you could cherry pick the ones that had lower tolerance, but in reality, the vendor pre-sorted for this, so if you bought the cheaper resistors you could almost guarantee they were crap. However, it was reasoned that by sophisticated design choices you could theoretically reduce the problem of high variance resistors so people started doing that. So you could solve your circuit design problem with a simpler scheme, but pay more for resistors, or have a more complicated circuit (with more things to manage that could go wrong) but get it done with cheaper resistors.
As expected, managers in 2nd rate companies didn't grasp this inherent tradeoff and wanted both cheaper resistors and the simpler circuits designed by novice designers. They bought loads of cheap resistors and put them in these simple circuits as a cost cutting move expecting the distribution of resistors to have normal statistical characteristics. Lo-and-behold they would eventually get a batch of resistors that were all low by 15% resulting in a 100% escape rate from their production line.