Because the people who feel they can't avoid using their cell phones often have absolutely no awareness of those around them, because they feel whatever they're doing is so important that the rest of us should have to put up with it.
This. I know someone that operates a hotel (and sometimes I used to help at the front desk). Often heavy smokers (and you can smell them as they walk up to the desk) specifically request a non-smoker room because they don't have to smell smoke. More often than not, they seem to end up lighting-up in that room because they just couldn't resist and they get indignant when the hotel attempts to fine them for smoking in a non-smoker room. The most common excuse was it was cold and didn't want to get dressed to go outside and I couldn't wait (as if that is somehow a valid excuse).
People addicted to telephones, texting and internet games would seem to fit this profile better than they would probably want to admit.
I'm not sure that it's a fair characterization that Obama care saves money. If it did, why did the medicare tax have to be extended to investment income, or why do high-value medical plans have to pay a luxury-tax, and why do we now have to pay a sur-tax/sales-tax on medical devices (which were previously exempt from transfer/sales tax)? It's because this money was required to pay for premium subsidies for "poor" people and for medicare expansion parts of the ACA.
We may be getting more value for the money we spend (more people covered, less overhead), but we are certainly not saving money.
Because of the fact of the federal subsidies (not the actual cost of services), in fact the more "poor" people sign up, the money that funded these subsidies came from taxes the "rich" must pay under the new law. Given the definition of rich these days (i.e., $250K single, $400K married), I imagine many if not most doctors fit that description...
Unfortunately, the real folks that get screwed under the ACA is the middle class. They make too much money to qualify for subsidies, they probably had reasonably good insurance already (equiv to gold/platinum which have fairly high premiums which are subsidized by the employer and the lowest out-of-pocket and high coverage percentages), but now they have to pay marginally more taxes and their premiums went up drastically to cover the expected increase in enrollees in these types of plans with pre-existing conditions (who don't mind the higher premium because they really need the benefit of high coverage percentage plans to reduce their out-of-pocket expenses to the 10% level of the platinum plan rather than the 40% level of the bronze plan).
As a result, many middle class are probably better off financially by avoiding the gold/platinum plans and switching to a high-deductible plan and putting their premiums into a health savings account, but that greatly increases the amount of paperwork they have to do (not a problem if you are rich and have an accountant to take care of this trivial stuff for you), so many middle class are likely to just end up subsidizing the folks with pre-existing conditions (I assume that even if you disagree doctors are rich, they are at least middle class, right?).
It appeared that there was some hope was that younger single people would join the ranks of those getting screwed because they would be "forced" to pay for insurance that they wouldn't use. However, it appears that those that didn't qualify for subsidies seem likely to not get insurance and not pay the fine (they don't appear to be signing up). Apparently the penalty for not paying the fine appears to be low and the IRS admitted they have no way to know if they need to fine someone (because they don't have a way to verify anyone has health insurance) short of a taxpayer audit so the offender must essentially voluntarily pay the fine.
In the abstract, the main measure of encryption that matters is that it has passed enough scruitiny based on currently known attack techniques. You really have to get your stuff out there before you know how good it is.
To this end, this person isn't a fly-by-night encryption designer, but somone who has a stream cipher accepted into the eSTREAM portfolio. AFAIK, ChaCha is a derivative of the Salsa20 stream cipher and can be used similarly to RC-4 (although the similarities are only superficial to RC-4).
Poly1305 is really a just a MAC (message authentication code) technique which relies on an underlying cipher (usually AES). It's more sophisticated than the standardized CMAC (cipher-based MAC) but more simiilar to GMAC (the galois-field MAC that is part of the GCM encryption technique used by WiGig).
There are fundamental structural issues in the car business. Although many of these are mirrored in other industries such as supply chain narrowing (like how a fire in an obscure factory can bring down a silcon foundary business or a flood in thailand can make disc drives scarce), there are a few that are specific to the car biz.
One issue with the car industry is that because of certain union contracts, GM often was unable to easily modify production to meet demand (resulting in non-optimal inventory for demain and creating pricing problems that affected profitablity). Another issue was the maze of dealer protection laws (some of which tesla is experiencing) that created issues with providing steady sales volume of popular cars.
The biggest structural problem in the demand for cars is that financing (the grease that makes the car transactions work) dried up. A healthy company could have perhaps mitigated this by temporarily providing dealer or factory financing options, but GM (and ALLY aka GMAC) wasn't able to scare up enough liquidity to make that work. This is probably the most similar to the 1930's situation in which the governments probably actually exasparated the credit crunch. People familiar with this wanted the government to avoid that mistake. It's perhaps not a comparison, more than a lesson learned from the 1930's.
There are some other things that are mostly just mismanagement (e.g., aggreeing to unsustainable employee benefits when profits were high and not investing enough in forward looking technologies), but these probably aren't enough to bring the house down in a slow-down, but provided enough of a boat-anchor in combination with the structural problems that tipped over the boat.
Some say the car problem (the fact that cars are often financed at mostly vertical market rates rather than broad-based rates) is a lesson for the housing problem (which is financed mostly at government intervention interest rates because of tax-incentives). As long as financing is not market rate, it is easy to get quickly out of equilibrium both ways because financing is highly leveraged. People talk about limiting the ability of banks to speculate with deposits backed with estimates of future income, but ignore that is exactly what most of the population is doing with thier savings when they buy a car, house or expensive vacation. Nobody however, seems to be talking about legislative limits on how the population can destablize the economy with thier borrowing habits and forcing people to have some minimum liquidity ratio.
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." - J. Paul Getty Of course the only difference is that most of "us" are not too big to fail...
Although the desktop is a big market and will continue to be one for some time, the lack of growth means a likely shift from research to development (to make things cheaper) as the competition reduces the gross margins, but new research doesn't pay back (it's good enough). The platform will probably die a slow death as new research money (and they people that chase that money) move on to the shiny new stuff and as vendor consolidate to reduce overhead and competition, the number of product offerings will shrink.
If you want to compare this with the mainframe, there are only really 2 types of mainframes today. IBM (zOS) and clusters. Although people often talk about servers and super-computers as mainframes, they really aren't the same thing. Although once a highly vibrant multi-vendor industry, modern mainframes have specialized to the point where they are really just encrypted transactional database processing machines provided mostly by one company (IBM 90% market share). It may be a multi-billion dollar industry, but it's mostly vertically integrated and single sourced. I think if the PC business morphed back into this model because of lack of growth, I doubt anyone would recognize this as the desktop that they know and love anymore...
I think a better analogy for the desktop is the wristwatch business. Although it might appear that there are many watch manufactures, most vendor just buy a movement from a handful of vendors. This is pretty much how the desktop is now (small number of ODMs, selling standard stuff to companies that repackage).
For a while, the end-user price of a watch seemed to be going down and there are many available options, but more recently the price of a decent watch is instead it is going up. Why? Because instead of being a growth industry, less people are buying watches (because everyone has a time-telling cell-phone) and the low-cost players chased out all the bulk of the industry and the remaining players are selling jewelry that happens to also be a watch. The movements in these low-end products haven't really changed in years. Of course there are always a few niche players that are more vertically integrated or buy high-end movements direct from other vertically integrated vendors and craft them into custom products, but you pay through the nose to buy them because there is no down-market to create a volume business as the velocity of innovation slows.
In the watch biz, high-end movements today don't get picked up by the low-end folks after a few years, the low-end movements are completely optimized differently for price and manufacturablity, the old high-end stuff just gets end-of-life/discontinued because the parts were never produced in enough volumes for a low-end volume business and the high-end folks don't want to canabalize their own business by dumping their old high-end stuff in the discount bin.
I think the PC desktop business has already bifurcated into this today. If you want a generic vanilla low-end platform where you can install linux, it will probably exist for a long time. If you want something high-end, you will likely pay the "niche-tax" for it. Who knows, it might track the watch business as desktop usage declines, but unless a low-end "jewelry-like" segment emerges, the low-end may just evaporate because of low-demand. I think many folks feel the tablet will emerge as the "jewelry" segment so in this case the low-end of the desktop business might be doomed. In which case, it might still be a multi-million dollar business, but each PC will be at least $2,000 (ironically, the same as the low-side of the high-end retail watch business) instead of under $500 (the average retail price of a "jewelry" watch before it hits the discount bin).
Still the most potent anti-biotic on the planet is plain old penicillin. And no, Amoxycillin and all its derivatives aren't the same and aren't better. UNLESS you are allergic to penicillin. Then you have no choice. Thing is, penicillin is about a nickel a pill and it works much faster. No money in it for the drug companies.
Same with sweeteners. Still the safest on the market is saccharin. But the patent ran out on it so the drug companies again needed a way to make money.
Okay, I'll bite...
Except for the small fact that penicillin is basically ineffective against most gram-negative bacteria (because of the outer membrane of GN-bacteria). Many common bacterial including E coli, H pylori, and various strains of Salmonella are gram negative and can cause various problems if they infect certain tissues in the body. This particular campaign was for drugs that attack gram-negative bacteria (the trial kits test against a supposedly non-pathogenic strain of E coli).
Also most artificial sweeteners are all pretty much all poison (saccaharin included), and even worse they generally haven't been show to actually prevent any of the problems associated with high sugar intake (including weight gain, diabetes and cardiac issues). Even mostly natural substitutes are generally high in fructose (yes the same "F" that is in HFCS) and that includes honey and agave syrup. The jury is out on Stevia and Monk Fruit. Just eat less sweet stuff.
A bunch of scientists with enough spare time who apparently can't find enough funding to be fully employed experimenting with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their spare time in their make-shift private labs...
Or better yet some wannabe scientists that think they know what they are doing trying their first experiments with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their basements and garages.
Although I don't have any evidence (this is/.), it seems clear that this is probably simply yet another manifestation of DNA methylation.
As I understand it, most of the genome is modulated and/or inactivated by DNA methylation of primarily CpG sites (aparently to prevent junk dna from running amok like in cancer, but also to control differentiation/specialization and). Although the mechanisms and pathways for this are currently not well understood, it seems likely that the proteins that governed the response to this stimulus was effectively coded in the DNA already, but inhibited by DNA methylation. By changing the methylation in the DNA of the gametes this response was able to be passed through to the offspring.
The bigger question is how the methylation is done. If it is done by environmental exposure (e.g, the brain and the gamete cells are over-exposed to the same stimulus from the bloodstream and respond the the same way by changing the methylation pattern to favor a response to that stimulus), that seems fairly straightforward. If, however, the brain can create simulation that causes specific methylation in the gamets, that is a whole nuther ball of wax...
In this experiment they targeted a specific olfactory pathway in the mice (Olfr151) and trained them with a behavior. Apparently, in later generations there was less methylation of the gene corresponding to this pathway providing a more enhanced response to this smell and apparently learned to distinguish this smell better. To me that isn't transferring a memory, it's really more like pre-conditioning to match a learned state.
The difference is subtle, but one way to look at it it like earning money vs inheriting it where the memory is the "how-to-make-money" part and the dna-methylation pattern is the "money". Although the offspring still have money, their behavior is not necessarily the same as the parents.
Two things... 1. Someone will attempt to declare their google glass a kind of "service-animal" (in California anyhow, I've heard that service iguanas are actually legal if they are considered to assist in an emotional disability).
2. There is a restaurant chain called the Trail-Dust Steakhouse that ban neck-ties**. If you go in with a neck-tie, a bunch of waiter come around with a big cow-bell and cut off your neck-tie and pin it to the wall (you can add a business card). Perhaps a restaurant will ban google-glass and maybe do the same schick;^)
** This is the official warning they give patrons "This ain't no country club! No ties after 5, so ya'll have two choices – you can take 'em off or we'll cut 'em off!"
Step 1: Determine when a competing trader is in the most vulnerable position Step 2: Seed clouds to start a weather pattern that reduces bandwidth of the microwave relay Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit!
I can possibly see a large chain store interested in recycling your reusable bag if they got some money from you on the initial purchase and they get some free advertising in return. Expecting a store to give you a generic bag and for them to clean and replace the bags for you seems to be put your suggestions in the realm of fantasy world thinking.
On the other hand, large department stores used to freely give out fairly large reusable bags for merchandise but these bags of course had their corporate logos splashed all over. Unfortunately in most jurisdictions that eliminated plastic bags, local ordinances require them to charge customers for any paper bags even if the store offers to replace the user supplied bag with a similar bag albeit with the stores logo (I was dubious, but I actually researched this after someone in a department store told me she technically** was supposed to charge me to replace a torn bag that I brought in). Given this reality, I'm guessing cleaning and replacing (for free) any bags would be a non-starter in most places where a bag charge requirement exists even if the companies were generous enough to forgo the advertising possibilities that might finance it.
**apparently, her manager told her some localities send in people to see if stores are in compliance with bags charge ordinances and actually issue warnings and/or citations. She compared this to how the police send in underage people into bars to look for liquor license violations. Although she said she had to charge me, in this situation, she did end up giving me a free bag, though...
Suicide is illegal, as well. So, really, there isn't. The cold hard legal fact is, you do not have a choice.
I think this attitude is cop-out. You always have a choice to break a law, you may just have to suffer the consequences. In this case, if you fail in your suicide attempt, you may be subject to temporary involuntary psychiatric incarceration (5150 or 5250) where your odds of retrying is very small.
As a totally stupid example, if someone in your car was going to die if you didn't speed (and/or run a red light) to get to the hospital, it is a cold hard legal fact that if you get to the hospital, you have broken the law. You still have a choice.
The problem some folks have is with the euphamistic assisted suicide (aka homicide). Is homicide always illegal? Apparantly not (given all the stand-your-ground laws and police shootings and wars). As a society we choose what is legal and what is not. As a member of society, you choose to follow or not. Today society has made one choice, tomorrow another. None of this stuff is black and white.
Which really brings me to the other point. Most of laws regarding homicide simply criminalize certain thoughts more than others. For better or worse, as a society, we have basically chosen to assert penalties for actions according to the motivations of the criminal. It's not a stretch to simply say that homicide with the consent of the deceased should be an infraction (like a parking ticket). The flip side of making it legal makes it difficult to assert penalties when homocide is "legal" (look at all the furor that always surrounds homocides that involve wars, police shootings, and people asserting make-my-day law defenses). The administrative certainties of an infraction seem infinitely better than the uncertainty of attempting to legalize something and suffering the roll of the jury dice.
Just like parking tickets, homocide like this it happens every day. Doctors pull the plug all the time to relieve suffering and there are no charges. It's just done hush-hush.
There never has, nor will be, a shortage of mathematically and scientifically minded individuals. They drive the economy, and can do it mostly single-handedly.
Hardly. Capital drives the economy. Capital sometimes attracts matematically minded individuals (e.g., hedge funds, analytics), and other times mathematical or scientific minds attract capital investment (e.g, pharma, agri, semiconductors, internet).
Historically, capital came from old-money. More recently, capital came from serial entrepreneurs (who got their initial capital from old money). Now you can get some capital direct from the market (e.g., stuff like kickstarter). In any case, that's not mostly single-handedly.
Our policy was to wear sneakers. In fact, I think they specifically told us not to wear steel-toed shoes.
I'm just guessing, but it's probably because if as part of the required written employer hazard assessment of workplace safety, they made the determination you need some sort of PPE (personal protective equiment), then they would be on the hook for communicating the hazards, training the employees on the proper use of the PPE, monitoring their use, and depending on the type of PPE potentially paying for it.
By not officially considering it a hazard of your job that heavy things might drop on your feet, if they told you to wear safety shoes, they would probably get into trouble for telling you to do this and not training you and monitoring it... Of course in the warehouse I was working, I was occasionally operating a fork-lift and those forks are really heavy (and not permanently attached to the vehicle either) so they required safety shoes. Although it wasn't required by law*** (apparently safety shoes one of the PPEs exempt from the OSHA reimbursement requirement), if we brought in a reciept for the shoes, they would let us expense it up to $50... As you might imagine, the safety shoe training was kind of a joke.
***1910.132(h)(2) The employer is not required to pay for non-specialty safety-toe protective footwear (including steel-toe shoes or steel-toe boots) and non-specialty prescription safety eyewear, provided that the employer permits such items to be worn off the job-site.
Having worked in a warehouse before, the physical toll of WALKING on a concrete industrial floor can be bad. My back, feet, and knees were in bad shape after about 9 months. You need to wear proper foot attire but most people working these jobs don't learn that until it's too late. Brand new athletic shoes were "flat" after 2 months yet they looked like they were in mint condition.
Having worked a warehouse before, I can tell you that one problem is finding a pair of remotely comfortable osha compliant steel-toed shoes. Anything remotely similar to athletic shoes with inserts would have been a godsend.
So SAG isn't doing their job? Or they negotiate for the 99%s and when the 1% writes gold, they get screwed?
Actually, SAG isn't doing their job** and they negotiate for the 99%. The 1% isn't doing any better, but the 1% has better PR.
**Example, SAG negotiated to give away 80% of the DVD revenue (the formula only applies to 20% of the gross). Maybe they'll do better at the New Media negotiations... or not...
Q: if it is common knowledge of Hollywood accounting tactics, why do people still make deals that depend on it not being the way it commonly is?
I asked this question once to my cousin who is in the business (actor, writer and is dating a director) who basically told me that this is mostly something that everyone knows about but must live with (if you don't take the deal they offer, they will find someone else). Most contracts are apparently standard SAG negotiated rates so are roughly based on the gross (albeit a small percentage, minus some hefty, but standard deductions). If you somehow get a residual check, it was "Mailbox Magic" (or something like that).
Apparently the ones you hear about mostly the press are separate non-standard contracts with individual talent that are apparently poorly negotiated and/or executed by agents. I have no knowledge of the details of such contracts, but I'm guessing that they more closely resemble hand-shake deals more than a legal treatise (which makes it unsurprising that one of the parties can drive trucks through the contract)...
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's easier to claim both sided must have agreed to common-sense understanding of a clause of a well-trodden standard-issue contract than a one-off contract which is why the rank-and-file gets the standard-issue one.
Not to totally disagree, but many of the examples you used are more indicative of someone getting the arrows and someone else picking up the spoils... The bleeding edge is often doomed to be mediocre in comparison because if there is a very low barrier to entry, the effort to refine is much less than the haphazard initial effort which inevitably brings along a bunch of baggage and dead-weight. Luck is sometimes not making the same mistakes as those you are following (or perhaps capitalizing on those mistakes).
Subjectively he was a functional member of society and a respected scientist and he was subjectively aware that he was motivated by power and a tendency to manipulate other.
So he felt that he needed to be more introspective about his behaviour when he found out something about himself that threatened to make the vaguely subjective awareness into something objective. Why is that troubling? Intelligent people often don't like being a subject to the fates. To me it would be more troubling if as a functioning member of society and a respected scientist he was simply fatalistic about it and say went on a killing rampage because he discovered this fact about himself.
The US already raised the capital gains tax. In 2013, it went up from 15% to 20% and there is an additional surtax of 3.8% on investment income (you now have to pay medicare tax on investment income including real-estate transactions to help fund the ACA aka obamacare).
You seem to be floating the proposition that the government must be the investor. Private industry could make the investment, but why not? You could say private investors are short sighted and aren't patient enough to wait for returns, but the reality is probably that the returns aren't likely to be worth the future cost of money. Keep in mind why many of the up-and coming solar power enterprises failed. It was because of low-cost imports made on-shore enterprises unprofitable (even in the long term their businesses appeared structurally untenable which is why they weren't able to attract private capital and had to use govt backed loan guarentees).***
So what do we do? Currently, in effect, we seem to be subsidizing the overseas industry by giving tax credits for installation and forcing utilities to buy excess power from roof-top installations at non-commericial rates to help make installation of these overseas panels make economic sense. By giving govt guaranteed loans to on-shore companies to attempt to compete, are we attempting to break the laws of economics? Should we continue to subsidize the overseas solar industry or pull back? Or perhaps should wait until the economics gets sorted out before we pour more money into the current situation.
***In contrast, the transcontinental railroad was able to attract all sorts of private capital in addition to the US-backed revenue bonds issued to fund it because the business folks and investors saw the light at the end of the line (new markets, telegraphand the government didn't have to worry about stuff like the bond money going to overseas iron suppliers (although there were a significant number of imported chinese and irish labor used).
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Because the people who feel they can't avoid using their cell phones often have absolutely no awareness of those around them, because they feel whatever they're doing is so important that the rest of us should have to put up with it.
This. I know someone that operates a hotel (and sometimes I used to help at the front desk). Often heavy smokers (and you can smell them as they walk up to the desk) specifically request a non-smoker room because they don't have to smell smoke. More often than not, they seem to end up lighting-up in that room because they just couldn't resist and they get indignant when the hotel attempts to fine them for smoking in a non-smoker room. The most common excuse was it was cold and didn't want to get dressed to go outside and I couldn't wait (as if that is somehow a valid excuse).
People addicted to telephones, texting and internet games would seem to fit this profile better than they would probably want to admit.
I'm not sure that it's a fair characterization that Obama care saves money. If it did, why did the medicare tax have to be extended to investment income, or why do high-value medical plans have to pay a luxury-tax, and why do we now have to pay a sur-tax/sales-tax on medical devices (which were previously exempt from transfer/sales tax)? It's because this money was required to pay for premium subsidies for "poor" people and for medicare expansion parts of the ACA.
We may be getting more value for the money we spend (more people covered, less overhead), but we are certainly not saving money.
Because of the fact of the federal subsidies (not the actual cost of services), in fact the more "poor" people sign up, the money that funded these subsidies came from taxes the "rich" must pay under the new law. Given the definition of rich these days (i.e., $250K single, $400K married), I imagine many if not most doctors fit that description...
Unfortunately, the real folks that get screwed under the ACA is the middle class. They make too much money to qualify for subsidies, they probably had reasonably good insurance already (equiv to gold/platinum which have fairly high premiums which are subsidized by the employer and the lowest out-of-pocket and high coverage percentages), but now they have to pay marginally more taxes and their premiums went up drastically to cover the expected increase in enrollees in these types of plans with pre-existing conditions (who don't mind the higher premium because they really need the benefit of high coverage percentage plans to reduce their out-of-pocket expenses to the 10% level of the platinum plan rather than the 40% level of the bronze plan).
As a result, many middle class are probably better off financially by avoiding the gold/platinum plans and switching to a high-deductible plan and putting their premiums into a health savings account, but that greatly increases the amount of paperwork they have to do (not a problem if you are rich and have an accountant to take care of this trivial stuff for you), so many middle class are likely to just end up subsidizing the folks with pre-existing conditions (I assume that even if you disagree doctors are rich, they are at least middle class, right?).
It appeared that there was some hope was that younger single people would join the ranks of those getting screwed because they would be "forced" to pay for insurance that they wouldn't use. However, it appears that those that didn't qualify for subsidies seem likely to not get insurance and not pay the fine (they don't appear to be signing up). Apparently the penalty for not paying the fine appears to be low and the IRS admitted they have no way to know if they need to fine someone (because they don't have a way to verify anyone has health insurance) short of a taxpayer audit so the offender must essentially voluntarily pay the fine.
In the abstract, the main measure of encryption that matters is that it has passed enough scruitiny based on currently known attack techniques. You really have to get your stuff out there before you know how good it is.
To this end, this person isn't a fly-by-night encryption designer, but somone who has a stream cipher accepted into the eSTREAM portfolio. AFAIK, ChaCha is a derivative of the Salsa20 stream cipher and can be used similarly to RC-4 (although the similarities are only superficial to RC-4).
Poly1305 is really a just a MAC (message authentication code) technique which relies on an underlying cipher (usually AES). It's more sophisticated than the standardized CMAC (cipher-based MAC) but more simiilar to GMAC (the galois-field MAC that is part of the GCM encryption technique used by WiGig).
There are fundamental structural issues in the car business. Although many of these are mirrored in other industries such as supply chain narrowing (like how a fire in an obscure factory can bring down a silcon foundary business or a flood in thailand can make disc drives scarce), there are a few that are specific to the car biz.
One issue with the car industry is that because of certain union contracts, GM often was unable to easily modify production to meet demand (resulting in non-optimal inventory for demain and creating pricing problems that affected profitablity). Another issue was the maze of dealer protection laws (some of which tesla is experiencing) that created issues with providing steady sales volume of popular cars.
The biggest structural problem in the demand for cars is that financing (the grease that makes the car transactions work) dried up. A healthy company could have perhaps mitigated this by temporarily providing dealer or factory financing options, but GM (and ALLY aka GMAC) wasn't able to scare up enough liquidity to make that work. This is probably the most similar to the 1930's situation in which the governments probably actually exasparated the credit crunch. People familiar with this wanted the government to avoid that mistake. It's perhaps not a comparison, more than a lesson learned from the 1930's.
There are some other things that are mostly just mismanagement (e.g., aggreeing to unsustainable employee benefits when profits were high and not investing enough in forward looking technologies), but these probably aren't enough to bring the house down in a slow-down, but provided enough of a boat-anchor in combination with the structural problems that tipped over the boat.
Some say the car problem (the fact that cars are often financed at mostly vertical market rates rather than broad-based rates) is a lesson for the housing problem (which is financed mostly at government intervention interest rates because of tax-incentives). As long as financing is not market rate, it is easy to get quickly out of equilibrium both ways because financing is highly leveraged. People talk about limiting the ability of banks to speculate with deposits backed with estimates of future income, but ignore that is exactly what most of the population is doing with thier savings when they buy a car, house or expensive vacation. Nobody however, seems to be talking about legislative limits on how the population can destablize the economy with thier borrowing habits and forcing people to have some minimum liquidity ratio.
Q: Which cut of Brazil does the Netflix stream (no I don't have a netflix account)? Hopefully not the atrocious "Love Conquers All" version...
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." - J. Paul Getty
Of course the only difference is that most of "us" are not too big to fail...
Although the desktop is a big market and will continue to be one for some time, the lack of growth means a likely shift from research to development (to make things cheaper) as the competition reduces the gross margins, but new research doesn't pay back (it's good enough). The platform will probably die a slow death as new research money (and they people that chase that money) move on to the shiny new stuff and as vendor consolidate to reduce overhead and competition, the number of product offerings will shrink.
If you want to compare this with the mainframe, there are only really 2 types of mainframes today. IBM (zOS) and clusters. Although people often talk about servers and super-computers as mainframes, they really aren't the same thing. Although once a highly vibrant multi-vendor industry, modern mainframes have specialized to the point where they are really just encrypted transactional database processing machines provided mostly by one company (IBM 90% market share). It may be a multi-billion dollar industry, but it's mostly vertically integrated and single sourced. I think if the PC business morphed back into this model because of lack of growth, I doubt anyone would recognize this as the desktop that they know and love anymore...
I think a better analogy for the desktop is the wristwatch business. Although it might appear that there are many watch manufactures, most vendor just buy a movement from a handful of vendors. This is pretty much how the desktop is now (small number of ODMs, selling standard stuff to companies that repackage).
For a while, the end-user price of a watch seemed to be going down and there are many available options, but more recently the price of a decent watch is instead it is going up. Why? Because instead of being a growth industry, less people are buying watches (because everyone has a time-telling cell-phone) and the low-cost players chased out all the bulk of the industry and the remaining players are selling jewelry that happens to also be a watch. The movements in these low-end products haven't really changed in years. Of course there are always a few niche players that are more vertically integrated or buy high-end movements direct from other vertically integrated vendors and craft them into custom products, but you pay through the nose to buy them because there is no down-market to create a volume business as the velocity of innovation slows.
In the watch biz, high-end movements today don't get picked up by the low-end folks after a few years, the low-end movements are completely optimized differently for price and manufacturablity, the old high-end stuff just gets end-of-life/discontinued because the parts were never produced in enough volumes for a low-end volume business and the high-end folks don't want to canabalize their own business by dumping their old high-end stuff in the discount bin.
I think the PC desktop business has already bifurcated into this today. If you want a generic vanilla low-end platform where you can install linux, it will probably exist for a long time. If you want something high-end, you will likely pay the "niche-tax" for it. Who knows, it might track the watch business as desktop usage declines, but unless a low-end "jewelry-like" segment emerges, the low-end may just evaporate because of low-demand. I think many folks feel the tablet will emerge as the "jewelry" segment so in this case the low-end of the desktop business might be doomed. In which case, it might still be a multi-million dollar business, but each PC will be at least $2,000 (ironically, the same as the low-side of the high-end retail watch business) instead of under $500 (the average retail price of a "jewelry" watch before it hits the discount bin).
Still the most potent anti-biotic on the planet is plain old penicillin. And no, Amoxycillin and all its derivatives aren't the same and aren't better. UNLESS you are allergic to penicillin. Then you have no choice. Thing is, penicillin is about a nickel a pill and it works much faster. No money in it for the drug companies.
Same with sweeteners. Still the safest on the market is saccharin. But the patent ran out on it so the drug companies again needed a way to make money.
Okay, I'll bite...
Except for the small fact that penicillin is basically ineffective against most gram-negative bacteria (because of the outer membrane of GN-bacteria). Many common bacterial including E coli, H pylori, and various strains of Salmonella are gram negative and can cause various problems if they infect certain tissues in the body. This particular campaign was for drugs that attack gram-negative bacteria (the trial kits test against a supposedly non-pathogenic strain of E coli).
Also most artificial sweeteners are all pretty much all poison (saccaharin included), and even worse they generally haven't been show to actually prevent any of the problems associated with high sugar intake (including weight gain, diabetes and cardiac issues). Even mostly natural substitutes are generally high in fructose (yes the same "F" that is in HFCS) and that includes honey and agave syrup. The jury is out on Stevia and Monk Fruit. Just eat less sweet stuff.
A bunch of scientists with enough spare time who apparently can't find enough funding to be fully employed experimenting with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their spare time in their make-shift private labs...
Or better yet some wannabe scientists that think they know what they are doing trying their first experiments with antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria in their basements and garages.
What could possibly go wrong?
Although I don't have any evidence (this is /.), it seems clear that this is probably simply yet another manifestation of DNA methylation.
As I understand it, most of the genome is modulated and/or inactivated by DNA methylation of primarily CpG sites (aparently to prevent junk dna from running amok like in cancer, but also to control differentiation/specialization and). Although the mechanisms and pathways for this are currently not well understood, it seems likely that the proteins that governed the response to this stimulus was effectively coded in the DNA already, but inhibited by DNA methylation. By changing the methylation in the DNA of the gametes this response was able to be passed through to the offspring.
The bigger question is how the methylation is done. If it is done by environmental exposure (e.g, the brain and the gamete cells are over-exposed to the same stimulus from the bloodstream and respond the the same way by changing the methylation pattern to favor a response to that stimulus), that seems fairly straightforward. If, however, the brain can create simulation that causes specific methylation in the gamets, that is a whole nuther ball of wax...
In this experiment they targeted a specific olfactory pathway in the mice (Olfr151) and trained them with a behavior. Apparently, in later generations there was less methylation of the gene corresponding to this pathway providing a more enhanced response to this smell and apparently learned to distinguish this smell better. To me that isn't transferring a memory, it's really more like pre-conditioning to match a learned state.
The difference is subtle, but one way to look at it it like earning money vs inheriting it where the memory is the "how-to-make-money" part and the dna-methylation pattern is the "money". Although the offspring still have money, their behavior is not necessarily the same as the parents.
Two things...
1. Someone will attempt to declare their google glass a kind of "service-animal" (in California anyhow, I've heard that service iguanas are actually legal if they are considered to assist in an emotional disability).
2. There is a restaurant chain called the Trail-Dust Steakhouse that ban neck-ties**. If you go in with a neck-tie, a bunch of waiter come around with a big cow-bell and cut off your neck-tie and pin it to the wall (you can add a business card). Perhaps a restaurant will ban google-glass and maybe do the same schick ;^)
** This is the official warning they give patrons "This ain't no country club! No ties after 5, so ya'll have two choices – you can take 'em off or we'll cut 'em off!"
Step 1: Determine when a competing trader is in the most vulnerable position
Step 2: Seed clouds to start a weather pattern that reduces bandwidth of the microwave relay
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit!
Your #2 and #3 conflict.
I can possibly see a large chain store interested in recycling your reusable bag if they got some money from you on the initial purchase and they get some free advertising in return. Expecting a store to give you a generic bag and for them to clean and replace the bags for you seems to be put your suggestions in the realm of fantasy world thinking.
On the other hand, large department stores used to freely give out fairly large reusable bags for merchandise but these bags of course had their corporate logos splashed all over. Unfortunately in most jurisdictions that eliminated plastic bags, local ordinances require them to charge customers for any paper bags even if the store offers to replace the user supplied bag with a similar bag albeit with the stores logo (I was dubious, but I actually researched this after someone in a department store told me she technically** was supposed to charge me to replace a torn bag that I brought in). Given this reality, I'm guessing cleaning and replacing (for free) any bags would be a non-starter in most places where a bag charge requirement exists even if the companies were generous enough to forgo the advertising possibilities that might finance it.
**apparently, her manager told her some localities send in people to see if stores are in compliance with bags charge ordinances and actually issue warnings and/or citations. She compared this to how the police send in underage people into bars to look for liquor license violations. Although she said she had to charge me, in this situation, she did end up giving me a free bag, though...
Suicide is illegal, as well. So, really, there isn't. The cold hard legal fact is, you do not have a choice.
I think this attitude is cop-out. You always have a choice to break a law, you may just have to suffer the consequences. In this case, if you fail in your suicide attempt, you may be subject to temporary involuntary psychiatric incarceration (5150 or 5250) where your odds of retrying is very small.
As a totally stupid example, if someone in your car was going to die if you didn't speed (and/or run a red light) to get to the hospital, it is a cold hard legal fact that if you get to the hospital, you have broken the law. You still have a choice.
The problem some folks have is with the euphamistic assisted suicide (aka homicide). Is homicide always illegal? Apparantly not (given all the stand-your-ground laws and police shootings and wars). As a society we choose what is legal and what is not. As a member of society, you choose to follow or not. Today society has made one choice, tomorrow another. None of this stuff is black and white.
Which really brings me to the other point. Most of laws regarding homicide simply criminalize certain thoughts more than others. For better or worse, as a society, we have basically chosen to assert penalties for actions according to the motivations of the criminal. It's not a stretch to simply say that homicide with the consent of the deceased should be an infraction (like a parking ticket). The flip side of making it legal makes it difficult to assert penalties when homocide is "legal" (look at all the furor that always surrounds homocides that involve wars, police shootings, and people asserting make-my-day law defenses). The administrative certainties of an infraction seem infinitely better than the uncertainty of attempting to legalize something and suffering the roll of the jury dice.
Just like parking tickets, homocide like this it happens every day. Doctors pull the plug all the time to relieve suffering and there are no charges. It's just done hush-hush.
There never has, nor will be, a shortage of mathematically and scientifically minded individuals. They drive the economy, and can do it mostly single-handedly.
Hardly. Capital drives the economy. Capital sometimes attracts matematically minded individuals (e.g., hedge funds, analytics), and other times mathematical or scientific minds attract capital investment (e.g, pharma, agri, semiconductors, internet).
Historically, capital came from old-money. More recently, capital came from serial entrepreneurs (who got their initial capital from old money). Now you can get some capital direct from the market (e.g., stuff like kickstarter). In any case, that's not mostly single-handedly.
Our policy was to wear sneakers. In fact, I think they specifically told us not to wear steel-toed shoes.
I'm just guessing, but it's probably because if as part of the required written employer hazard assessment of workplace safety, they made the determination you need some sort of PPE (personal protective equiment), then they would be on the hook for communicating the hazards, training the employees on the proper use of the PPE, monitoring their use, and depending on the type of PPE potentially paying for it.
By not officially considering it a hazard of your job that heavy things might drop on your feet, if they told you to wear safety shoes, they would probably get into trouble for telling you to do this and not training you and monitoring it... Of course in the warehouse I was working, I was occasionally operating a fork-lift and those forks are really heavy (and not permanently attached to the vehicle either) so they required safety shoes. Although it wasn't required by law*** (apparently safety shoes one of the PPEs exempt from the OSHA reimbursement requirement), if we brought in a reciept for the shoes, they would let us expense it up to $50... As you might imagine, the safety shoe training was kind of a joke.
***1910.132(h)(2) The employer is not required to pay for non-specialty safety-toe protective footwear (including steel-toe shoes or steel-toe boots) and non-specialty prescription safety eyewear, provided that the employer permits such items to be worn off the job-site.
Having worked in a warehouse before, the physical toll of WALKING on a concrete industrial floor can be bad. My back, feet, and knees were in bad shape after about 9 months. You need to wear proper foot attire but most people working these jobs don't learn that until it's too late. Brand new athletic shoes were "flat" after 2 months yet they looked like they were in mint condition.
Having worked a warehouse before, I can tell you that one problem is finding a pair of remotely comfortable osha compliant steel-toed shoes. Anything remotely similar to athletic shoes with inserts would have been a godsend.
Amazon factories are probably no worse than a typical UK call center... http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12691704
So SAG isn't doing their job? Or they negotiate for the 99%s and when the 1% writes gold, they get screwed?
Actually, SAG isn't doing their job** and they negotiate for the 99%.
The 1% isn't doing any better, but the 1% has better PR.
**Example, SAG negotiated to give away 80% of the DVD revenue (the formula only applies to 20% of the gross). Maybe they'll do better at the New Media negotiations... or not...
For those interested in a more in-depth treatment... http://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.3008.pdf
Q: if it is common knowledge of Hollywood accounting tactics, why do people still make deals that depend on it not being the way it commonly is?
I asked this question once to my cousin who is in the business (actor, writer and is dating a director) who basically told me that this is mostly something that everyone knows about but must live with (if you don't take the deal they offer, they will find someone else). Most contracts are apparently standard SAG negotiated rates so are roughly based on the gross (albeit a small percentage, minus some hefty, but standard deductions). If you somehow get a residual check, it was "Mailbox Magic" (or something like that).
Apparently the ones you hear about mostly the press are separate non-standard contracts with individual talent that are apparently poorly negotiated and/or executed by agents. I have no knowledge of the details of such contracts, but I'm guessing that they more closely resemble hand-shake deals more than a legal treatise (which makes it unsurprising that one of the parties can drive trucks through the contract)...
IANAL, but my understanding is that it's easier to claim both sided must have agreed to common-sense understanding of a clause of a well-trodden standard-issue contract than a one-off contract which is why the rank-and-file gets the standard-issue one.
Not to totally disagree, but many of the examples you used are more indicative of someone getting the arrows and someone else picking up the spoils... The bleeding edge is often doomed to be mediocre in comparison because if there is a very low barrier to entry, the effort to refine is much less than the haphazard initial effort which inevitably brings along a bunch of baggage and dead-weight. Luck is sometimes not making the same mistakes as those you are following (or perhaps capitalizing on those mistakes).
Subjectively he was a functional member of society and a respected scientist and he was subjectively aware that he was motivated by power and a tendency to manipulate other.
So he felt that he needed to be more introspective about his behaviour when he found out something about himself that threatened to make the vaguely subjective awareness into something objective. Why is that troubling? Intelligent people often don't like being a subject to the fates. To me it would be more troubling if as a functioning member of society and a respected scientist he was simply fatalistic about it and say went on a killing rampage because he discovered this fact about himself.
Correlation does not make causation...
The US already raised the capital gains tax. In 2013, it went up from 15% to 20% and there is an additional surtax of 3.8% on investment income (you now have to pay medicare tax on investment income including real-estate transactions to help fund the ACA aka obamacare).
You seem to be floating the proposition that the government must be the investor. Private industry could make the investment, but why not? You could say private investors are short sighted and aren't patient enough to wait for returns, but the reality is probably that the returns aren't likely to be worth the future cost of money. Keep in mind why many of the up-and coming solar power enterprises failed. It was because of low-cost imports made on-shore enterprises unprofitable (even in the long term their businesses appeared structurally untenable which is why they weren't able to attract private capital and had to use govt backed loan guarentees).***
So what do we do? Currently, in effect, we seem to be subsidizing the overseas industry by giving tax credits for installation and forcing utilities to buy excess power from roof-top installations at non-commericial rates to help make installation of these overseas panels make economic sense. By giving govt guaranteed loans to on-shore companies to attempt to compete, are we attempting to break the laws of economics? Should we continue to subsidize the overseas solar industry or pull back? Or perhaps should wait until the economics gets sorted out before we pour more money into the current situation.
***In contrast, the transcontinental railroad was able to attract all sorts of private capital in addition to the US-backed revenue bonds issued to fund it because the business folks and investors saw the light at the end of the line (new markets, telegraphand the government didn't have to worry about stuff like the bond money going to overseas iron suppliers (although there were a significant number of imported chinese and irish labor used).