Because the gas station companies and many small merchants didn't want to absorb the cost of replacing their pumps and POS units. Not even when the banks told them they would be on the hook for any fraudulent charges. In most cases fraudulent charges to gas station companies and small business owners is a fraction of what they would pay to upgrade, so they just eat the cost, except they don't eat it. They pass the losses on to their customers or insurance companies. Or right them off as losses on their taxes.
In other words there is no incentive for them to work to secure the system. Likewise banks are more afraid of friction, the reduction of revenue from charges and interest than they are of fraud. They make enough on charges and interest that losses to fraud are insignificant. They push those fraud charges on to their customers anyway, so why should they care.
As a matter of fact since the customer in the U.S. can only be charged $50 for fraudulent charges, and in most cases they are not even required to pay that, customers don't really care about fraud either. It's mildly inconvenient but less inconvenient than having to remember a PIN (which most people would just compromise by using the same one for all their cards, or their birthday or last 4 of their social, or some other idiot combination.) or keeping up with some kind of authentication device.
Security only happens when there is a real cost to not being secure. Else convenience triumphs.
In the case of a Carrington event there will be no cell network to connect to, so the value of having an operating phone will be small. I suppose you could use it to look at saved photos or something, but generally speaking in the case of a Carrington event I'd be more worried about where my next meal was coming from rather than if my phone, which is likely to be useless for the next decade, worked.
This move of Amazon will create no jobs. They will move workers in from other areas, or hire college educated workers from other companies. they might pick up a few high GPA university students, who they would have hired anyway and who probably have a number of top flight Big Tech companies looking at them.
No unemployed New Yorker will get a job out of this. Even the janitors and cafeteria folks will be from contract companies who already have workers on the hook other places.
Amazon doesn't need these subsidies, but its a classic supply and demand situation. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of places that Amazon can put its HQ. Any place they do will see some level of influx of higher wage workers and jobs. If you want them then they're damading that you, as the locale, pay by giving them tax breaks. You, as the locale, can refuse to pay, but somewhere else will, and Amazon will go there.
People also overlook the obvious. Local politicians almost always come from the upper half of the economic scale. They are upper middle class moving on upper class. No locality actually wants to have poor people. Gentrification is something that almost all localities want, not something they try to avoid. If the courts didn't prevent them cities would still have vagrancy laws the police and sheriffs offices of just about everywhere would still be telling the homeless "Be on the other side of the county line by sundown."
Chicago once put up high density housing for low income people. It was called the projects and resulted in places like Cabrini Green. It resulted in places plagued by crime, gang violence and generally deplorable living conditions. This is what you get when you make high density low income housing.
The problem is that, as K said, individuals are smart, people are stupid. When you get groups of people in these kinds of environments you end up with the tragedy of the common.
Conversely when people pony up a good deal of money to live in a high end condo, apartment, townhome, they have an interest in looking after their investment. Likewise the owners of businesses in the area, who would lose revenue if they don't keep their businesses clean and in good working order, invest in doing so.
There's really no way around it. Slums will always be slums as long as the same people live there. Cities succeed in urban renewal only when they displace the poor with higher income workers. It ain't fair but it's how it works.
George Soros isn't a liberal. He is a globalist. While many Progressive liberals have globalist leanings, Soros is a genuine market and money fund manipulating globalist. He uses money and influence to topple governments and seems to believe in and support not democracy but control of democratic institutions through influence pedaling and propaganda.
He's one of a number of ultra-rich people who have accumulated wealth not for it's own sake or for the material possessions it can buy, but so he can control people, countries and cultures.
He often aligns himself with liberal causes, but only so far as they advance his own agenda. He is a dangerous ally and not one to be trusted.
Yep, if Democrats have anything to say about it all those dead people and non-citizens will be voting a storm up for Democratic candidates.
I'm sure the poll workers will be working overtime stuffing ballots in their trunks for later use just in case a Republic actually gets enough votes to win.
Even more than that as I understand it the problem these workers have is that the guy left with a golden parachute. At that level managers take the job via contract and the contract usually includes a buyout so that if they don't work out they still get something for the time they've invested and what they've lost because they didn't take another job.
Now as I understand it the contract usually include outs for the company if the manager is found guilty of a crime. What they don't include is cutouts for HR actions, because getting rid of somebody that doesn't work out is always an HR action (Unless you're at the level the board of directors controls your hiring.)
SO it's quite possible Alphabet had no choice but to pay for the Golden Parachute unless they wanted to be sued. A suite they'd loose if the guy wasn't convicted of a crime.
Not throwing stones here but New Zealand is smaller than three of the U.S. states. Wiring rural America is a order of magnitude problem bigger than wiring New Zealand.
It similar to our wireless problem. New Zealand is 103,483 sq. miles. The U.S. 3,797,000 sq. miles. These things don't scale well.
More people are better off than any time in our history. We've got record levels of unemployment and penetration of devices like mobile phones is staggering. So claiming people are worse off is just wrong.
The U.S. has always been divided. When people have the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to disagree they will. Every generation acts as if this division is something new, but those who know their history realize it isn't. We're great mostly because we are different. Diversity is our strength.
Not a hospital, but a National Lab with lots of locally produced software. Software that doesn't handle the semiannual time change well or at all. When the developers get complaints about it every year their answer is basically, "It only happens twice a year. It's not worth the time it would take to fix it."
Management backs them saying they won't expend FTE's to address it, because "it only happens twice a year."
I think you've got it backwards. I've dealt with addicted family members.
They start out by stealing your stuff so they can buy drugs. Then they tell their druggy friends about your stuff and more serious and dangerous thieves start breaking into your house to steal your stuff.
If you're smart you cut them off and when they hit bottom maybe they'll get treatment and it will stick. Most of the time people enable them for years, because "they really can't help themselves" and "I care about them too much to let them go to jail; live on the street; etc."
Eventually you get burned one to many times because you get tried of living like you're poor because you can't buy anything nice without it getting stolen. If you're really unlucky they steal your identity to cover their other crimes and duct their outstanding warrants.
That's why a majority of these people don't have anyone. They've burned their bridges.
Absolutely agree that anyone advocating the "final solution" is just demented.
However, trying to slant homelessness as largely caused by mental illness is a stretched. Yes there is a significant portion of people who are mentally ill who are homeless. They can't hold a job. Don't fit well into society. They need long term care.
They should not be confused with drug addicts who are homeless because they chose at some point in their lives to use drugs rather than not. Many have developed mental problems because they've fried their brains. They don't self-medicate because they're mentally ill. They use drugs because they are addicted. They're addicted because at some time in the past they thought drug use was a good idea and somehow, unlike everyone else, they wouldn't get addicted.
Alcoholics are a mixed bag. Some have never had a chance for treatment. Most have, and failed. Is alcoholism a mental illness or a physical problem? There are actually good programs to help alcoholics who want to be helped. Of course the problem is most alcoholics on the street don't want to be helped if it means they can't drink.
I think you've got it backwards. They end up homeless because they have a drug or alcohol problem. I've worked with the homeless. They can be divided into groups or cohorts based on the cause of their homelessness.
The easiest to help are the short term homeless. They often tend to be single parent households, almost always female lead. Often their homelessness results from either fleeing spousal abuse or job loss. These people really respond well to properly run social programs. Help them get childcare and employment and subsidized housing and they are no longer homeless.
The drug addicts and alcoholics are a difficult problem. Treatment has a low probability of success. They don't do well in programs because they won't obey the rules. Most actually have family where they could go if they hadn't burned their bridges. There is no easy answer for these people. There might not be even hard answers.
The mentally ill need to be institutionalized. That's where they were before they were turned out into the streets. Getting them treatment without throwing them into prison-like mental hospitals is expensive, requires caregivers who are in it because they have empathy, rather than because they want to make money, and is probably not possible outside religious facilities. That's because you need caregivers who are on a mission rather than following a revenue stream. In other words a hard problem.
I don't expect much to come of this. Money will be siphoned off to support companies "helping" the homeless who don't spend enough to solve the underlying problem, but do very well for their stockholders. More homeless will flock to San Francisco because they can get more help there. The Big Tech companies will move to save on taxes and new companies will find other places to start up. Remember, this is a San Francisco tax. Companies don't need to leave California to avoid it. They can move across the bay or go a couple of miles outside the city and avoid it.
This is just fantasy. The most advanced rockets in the first half of the 20th century were developed by the Nazis. The USSR, not exactly known for its advanced personal cooperation, nor free of torture devices, was the first country to put both a satellite in orbit and a human in orbit. Only a massive effort by the U.S. with cooperation from a handful of other countries allowed them to reach the moon first.
Intellectual capacity has absolutely nothing to do with moral orientation. Slavery is not used in western society purely because Christianity made a stand against it and after nearly a century of work managed to get it legally banned. Look up William Wilberforce if you don't believe me. In the U.S. it took a bloody 5 year war and almost a century to begin to blow away the vestiges of it. By the way many of those vestiges, like segregation, including Alabama style segregation, still existed when the U.S. reached the moon.
So no. It doesn't require that a technologically advanced civilization be morally advanced.
There's no secret to what's happening. Steve Jobs was the innovator at Apple.
Since he's been gone there has been zero innovation there. In this case it's not really the engineers that innovate, it's the idea guy who sends the engineers the projects they work on and the integrators that take the individual small improvements to hardware and combine them into an actual innovative system. With Jobs gone Apple is just living off the carcass now. Its justa matter of time till they fold.
I hate to disagree with you here, but the Republicans controlling the senate can kill the filabuster any time they want. Had I been in charge of the senate the first thing I would have done was kill the closure requirement. The Democrats did it to get there way when they controlled the senate and actions should have consequences. When the Democrats decided to overturn Senate rules that had existed since the time of Jefferson because they couldn't get their way why should the Republicans continue to operate with one hand tied behind their backs?
The only answer is that they don't really want to engender change and fix problems. They want to keep the issues alive as voting issues just like the Democrats. To quote a Dead White Guy, "A plague on both your houses."
That would be great if once the government pays for the research its available to all, instead of what seems to be happening. The government pays for the research, then some company patents it and make a killing while the citizenry ends up paying through the nose for benefits of research they've already paid for.
But I think that the development of electric devices is the point. It took 200 years to go from chemicals in jars to PCs. On that basis fusion is realistically a century or more away, not 30 years.
From a non-physics point of view the social and economic disruption are more important than the science. Cheap fusion power will disrupt the whole international economy. Expensive fusion power will have little effect at all. At this point while people would like to think fusion power will eventually be cheap we really don't know what a real fusion power plant will cost. It might be cheap, but it might not. We don't know enough about the technology involved to make that determination.
At any rate I don't expect the problem to be solved in my lifetime, which doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money on it. But it's like money spent on determining the age of the universe or what happened in the first quarter second after the big bang. Theoretical research with no immediate practical use. Spend money on it because it's interesting to know, but don't expect it to be an investment for which there is a reasonable return any time soon.
This is a design problem and the result of inferior design.
The best (and most expensive) way to solve this problem is to design the stations so that passengers enter on one side of the train and leave on the other. This is the way rides are designed at amusement parks to facilitate the movement of crowds.
Barring that, a system which direct passengers to debark at certain doors (such as at the front) and enter at other doors (At the back) will also work. This has been used on buses, where passengers exit at the back and enter at the front (where they pay.)
The use of AI in this case may indeed result in fewer accidents resulting from moving trains hitting passengers in exclusion zones, but it will do nothing for keeping trains on time.
Fair enough. But I would say that these are examples of the scientific method working as it should. Mistakes or fraud may take time to detect, but sooner or later they are corrected.
And keep in mind that science is not the only human endeavour that has occasionally wasted time, money, and effort. Science progresses most efficiently when honest actors work together in good faith, scrutinizing each other's work but also building mutual trust. The waste from occasional bad actors is eclipsed by the benefit from the good ones.
That's all very well when science is relegated to its own little corner of the universe interested only in unimportant issues like when did the universe begin or is there life on some distance planet which will be unreachable for the next big bite of eternity.
It's quite another thing when fraudulent science is used to direct public policy which has an immediate and negative effect on people's actual lives. It is even more a problem when fraudulent science is used to precipitate cultural change that effects whole populations.
I absolutely should have the right to offend others. If you don't have the right to offend others then you don't really have freedom of speech.
It's easy to defend the speech rights of people with whom you agree, but unless you defend the right of free speech of people with whom you don't agree then you really don't believe in freedom of speech.
Don't worry a la carte is coming, but you won't like it.
All the major content providers are beginning to distribute their content through their own streaming services. Each of which wants to charge what you're probably already paying for Netflix or Hulu. So instead of getting content from many providrs like you now get from Netflix or Hulu you'll only get content from CBS or Disney or WB on each stream. To get it all you'll be paying as much or more than you now pay for cable. And you'll have to pay for an ISP besides, and probably a cell data plan too.
So be careful what you ask for. it's sure to cost you more.
You obviously don't understand how Social Security works. Does the phrase Ponzi Scheme mean anything to you? Social; Security is a Ponzi Scheme. It isn't "your money" once you give it to the government. It's a kind of tax that's used to pay people already receiving Social Security. It's a tax paid by you and your employer to allow people already receiving Social Security to be paid.
When the program was started the people to first receive Social Security payments hadn't paid in anything. They qualified because they were breathing and above a certain age. It was Roosevelt's scheme to lower the unemployment numbers by paying people to leave the workforce. In some way it's purpose is still to do that.
"Your money" doesn't get put into a bank account, investment account or even a piggy bank. The majority of it is used to pay people now on Social Security. The rest is spent by the government as part of the general fund.
As the ratio of retired workers to working workers increases the scheme will unravel as do all Ponzi Schemes.
Nice deflection. Unfortunately anyone who actually knows history knows that the socialist and Nazi's in the 1930's were separate branches of the socialist movement.
Hitler parted ways first with them (the SPD) and then with the SA of his own party.
The identification of the Nazi with the right was and is a tactic of the left used to paint conservatism and the right in general as espousing Nazi beliefs, which is of course, false.
Under the present political alignment the laissez-faire policies of right has more to do with classical liberalism than the income redistribution policies of left does. In any meaningful way conservatism is the political heir of classical liberalism and in no way related to Nazism or any form of fascism.
You've got it backwards. When you install the app it asks for permissions to access this that and the other. Most times if you say "no" the app doesn't work. If you say yes the app phones home and the server knows you've installed the app.
Now every so often the server uses push notifications to query the app. If it gets no response it assumes you've uninstalled it, since it won't work anyway if you block notifications and data access.
So yes you have controlled over whether you install the app or not. If you don't install it it won't call home. If you install it and don't let it call home it won't work, so presumably you will uninstall it. Either way since you searched for it in the playstore presumably you were interested. Since you downloaded you were interested. They can tell those things from the server side. No magic involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Why have a strip?
Because the gas station companies and many small merchants didn't want to absorb the cost of replacing their pumps and POS units. Not even when the banks told them they would be on the hook for any fraudulent charges. In most cases fraudulent charges to gas station companies and small business owners is a fraction of what they would pay to upgrade, so they just eat the cost, except they don't eat it. They pass the losses on to their customers or insurance companies. Or right them off as losses on their taxes.
In other words there is no incentive for them to work to secure the system. Likewise banks are more afraid of friction, the reduction of revenue from charges and interest than they are of fraud. They make enough on charges and interest that losses to fraud are insignificant. They push those fraud charges on to their customers anyway, so why should they care.
As a matter of fact since the customer in the U.S. can only be charged $50 for fraudulent charges, and in most cases they are not even required to pay that, customers don't really care about fraud either. It's mildly inconvenient but less inconvenient than having to remember a PIN (which most people would just compromise by using the same one for all their cards, or their birthday or last 4 of their social, or some other idiot combination.) or keeping up with some kind of authentication device.
Security only happens when there is a real cost to not being secure. Else convenience triumphs.
In the case of a Carrington event there will be no cell network to connect to, so the value of having an operating phone will be small. I suppose you could use it to look at saved photos or something, but generally speaking in the case of a Carrington event I'd be more worried about where my next meal was coming from rather than if my phone, which is likely to be useless for the next decade, worked.
This move of Amazon will create no jobs. They will move workers in from other areas, or hire college educated workers from other companies. they might pick up a few high GPA university students, who they would have hired anyway and who probably have a number of top flight Big Tech companies looking at them.
No unemployed New Yorker will get a job out of this. Even the janitors and cafeteria folks will be from contract companies who already have workers on the hook other places.
Amazon doesn't need these subsidies, but its a classic supply and demand situation. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of places that Amazon can put its HQ. Any place they do will see some level of influx of higher wage workers and jobs. If you want them then they're damading that you, as the locale, pay by giving them tax breaks. You, as the locale, can refuse to pay, but somewhere else will, and Amazon will go there.
People also overlook the obvious. Local politicians almost always come from the upper half of the economic scale. They are upper middle class moving on upper class. No locality actually wants to have poor people. Gentrification is something that almost all localities want, not something they try to avoid. If the courts didn't prevent them cities would still have vagrancy laws the police and sheriffs offices of just about everywhere would still be telling the homeless "Be on the other side of the county line by sundown."
Chicago once put up high density housing for low income people. It was called the projects and resulted in places like Cabrini Green. It resulted in places plagued by crime, gang violence and generally deplorable living conditions. This is what you get when you make high density low income housing.
The problem is that, as K said, individuals are smart, people are stupid. When you get groups of people in these kinds of environments you end up with the tragedy of the common.
Conversely when people pony up a good deal of money to live in a high end condo, apartment, townhome, they have an interest in looking after their investment. Likewise the owners of businesses in the area, who would lose revenue if they don't keep their businesses clean and in good working order, invest in doing so.
There's really no way around it. Slums will always be slums as long as the same people live there. Cities succeed in urban renewal only when they displace the poor with higher income workers. It ain't fair but it's how it works.
George Soros isn't a liberal. He is a globalist. While many Progressive liberals have globalist leanings, Soros is a genuine market and money fund manipulating globalist. He uses money and influence to topple governments and seems to believe in and support not democracy but control of democratic institutions through influence pedaling and propaganda.
He's one of a number of ultra-rich people who have accumulated wealth not for it's own sake or for the material possessions it can buy, but so he can control people, countries and cultures.
He often aligns himself with liberal causes, but only so far as they advance his own agenda. He is a dangerous ally and not one to be trusted.
Yep, if Democrats have anything to say about it all those dead people and non-citizens will be voting a storm up for Democratic candidates.
I'm sure the poll workers will be working overtime stuffing ballots in their trunks for later use just in case a Republic actually gets enough votes to win.
Even more than that as I understand it the problem these workers have is that the guy left with a golden parachute. At that level managers take the job via contract and the contract usually includes a buyout so that if they don't work out they still get something for the time they've invested and what they've lost because they didn't take another job.
Now as I understand it the contract usually include outs for the company if the manager is found guilty of a crime. What they don't include is cutouts for HR actions, because getting rid of somebody that doesn't work out is always an HR action (Unless you're at the level the board of directors controls your hiring.)
SO it's quite possible Alphabet had no choice but to pay for the Golden Parachute unless they wanted to be sued. A suite they'd loose if the guy wasn't convicted of a crime.
Not throwing stones here but New Zealand is smaller than three of the U.S. states. Wiring rural America is a order of magnitude problem bigger than wiring New Zealand.
It similar to our wireless problem. New Zealand is 103,483 sq. miles. The U.S. 3,797,000 sq. miles. These things don't scale well.
More people are better off than any time in our history. We've got record levels of unemployment and penetration of devices like mobile phones is staggering. So claiming people are worse off is just wrong.
The U.S. has always been divided. When people have the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to disagree they will. Every generation acts as if this division is something new, but those who know their history realize it isn't. We're great mostly because we are different. Diversity is our strength.
Not a hospital, but a National Lab with lots of locally produced software. Software that doesn't handle the semiannual time change well or at all. When the developers get complaints about it every year their answer is basically, "It only happens twice a year. It's not worth the time it would take to fix it."
Management backs them saying they won't expend FTE's to address it, because "it only happens twice a year."
I think you've got it backwards. I've dealt with addicted family members.
They start out by stealing your stuff so they can buy drugs. Then they tell their druggy friends about your stuff and more serious and dangerous thieves start breaking into your house to steal your stuff.
If you're smart you cut them off and when they hit bottom maybe they'll get treatment and it will stick. Most of the time people enable them for years, because "they really can't help themselves" and "I care about them too much to let them go to jail; live on the street; etc."
Eventually you get burned one to many times because you get tried of living like you're poor because you can't buy anything nice without it getting stolen. If you're really unlucky they steal your identity to cover their other crimes and duct their outstanding warrants.
That's why a majority of these people don't have anyone. They've burned their bridges.
Absolutely agree that anyone advocating the "final solution" is just demented.
However, trying to slant homelessness as largely caused by mental illness is a stretched. Yes there is a significant portion of people who are mentally ill who are homeless. They can't hold a job. Don't fit well into society. They need long term care.
They should not be confused with drug addicts who are homeless because they chose at some point in their lives to use drugs rather than not. Many have developed mental problems because they've fried their brains. They don't self-medicate because they're mentally ill. They use drugs because they are addicted. They're addicted because at some time in the past they thought drug use was a good idea and somehow, unlike everyone else, they wouldn't get addicted.
Alcoholics are a mixed bag. Some have never had a chance for treatment. Most have, and failed. Is alcoholism a mental illness or a physical problem? There are actually good programs to help alcoholics who want to be helped. Of course the problem is most alcoholics on the street don't want to be helped if it means they can't drink.
I think you've got it backwards. They end up homeless because they have a drug or alcohol problem. I've worked with the homeless. They can be divided into groups or cohorts based on the cause of their homelessness.
The easiest to help are the short term homeless. They often tend to be single parent households, almost always female lead. Often their homelessness results from either fleeing spousal abuse or job loss. These people really respond well to properly run social programs. Help them get childcare and employment and subsidized housing and they are no longer homeless.
The drug addicts and alcoholics are a difficult problem. Treatment has a low probability of success. They don't do well in programs because they won't obey the rules. Most actually have family where they could go if they hadn't burned their bridges. There is no easy answer for these people. There might not be even hard answers.
The mentally ill need to be institutionalized. That's where they were before they were turned out into the streets. Getting them treatment without throwing them into prison-like mental hospitals is expensive, requires caregivers who are in it because they have empathy, rather than because they want to make money, and is probably not possible outside religious facilities. That's because you need caregivers who are on a mission rather than following a revenue stream. In other words a hard problem.
I don't expect much to come of this. Money will be siphoned off to support companies "helping" the homeless who don't spend enough to solve the underlying problem, but do very well for their stockholders. More homeless will flock to San Francisco because they can get more help there. The Big Tech companies will move to save on taxes and new companies will find other places to start up. Remember, this is a San Francisco tax. Companies don't need to leave California to avoid it. They can move across the bay or go a couple of miles outside the city and avoid it.
This is just fantasy. The most advanced rockets in the first half of the 20th century were developed by the Nazis. The USSR, not exactly known for its advanced personal cooperation, nor free of torture devices, was the first country to put both a satellite in orbit and a human in orbit. Only a massive effort by the U.S. with cooperation from a handful of other countries allowed them to reach the moon first.
Intellectual capacity has absolutely nothing to do with moral orientation. Slavery is not used in western society purely because Christianity made a stand against it and after nearly a century of work managed to get it legally banned. Look up William Wilberforce if you don't believe me. In the U.S. it took a bloody 5 year war and almost a century to begin to blow away the vestiges of it. By the way many of those vestiges, like segregation, including Alabama style segregation, still existed when the U.S. reached the moon.
So no. It doesn't require that a technologically advanced civilization be morally advanced.
There's no secret to what's happening. Steve Jobs was the innovator at Apple.
Since he's been gone there has been zero innovation there. In this case it's not really the engineers that innovate, it's the idea guy who sends the engineers the projects they work on and the integrators that take the individual small improvements to hardware and combine them into an actual innovative system. With Jobs gone Apple is just living off the carcass now. Its justa matter of time till they fold.
I hate to disagree with you here, but the Republicans controlling the senate can kill the filabuster any time they want. Had I been in charge of the senate the first thing I would have done was kill the closure requirement. The Democrats did it to get there way when they controlled the senate and actions should have consequences. When the Democrats decided to overturn Senate rules that had existed since the time of Jefferson because they couldn't get their way why should the Republicans continue to operate with one hand tied behind their backs?
The only answer is that they don't really want to engender change and fix problems. They want to keep the issues alive as voting issues just like the Democrats. To quote a Dead White Guy, "A plague on both your houses."
That would be great if once the government pays for the research its available to all, instead of what seems to be happening. The government pays for the research, then some company patents it and make a killing while the citizenry ends up paying through the nose for benefits of research they've already paid for.
But I think that the development of electric devices is the point. It took 200 years to go from chemicals in jars to PCs. On that basis fusion is realistically a century or more away, not 30 years.
From a non-physics point of view the social and economic disruption are more important than the science. Cheap fusion power will disrupt the whole international economy. Expensive fusion power will have little effect at all. At this point while people would like to think fusion power will eventually be cheap we really don't know what a real fusion power plant will cost. It might be cheap, but it might not. We don't know enough about the technology involved to make that determination.
At any rate I don't expect the problem to be solved in my lifetime, which doesn't mean we shouldn't spend money on it. But it's like money spent on determining the age of the universe or what happened in the first quarter second after the big bang. Theoretical research with no immediate practical use. Spend money on it because it's interesting to know, but don't expect it to be an investment for which there is a reasonable return any time soon.
This is a design problem and the result of inferior design.
The best (and most expensive) way to solve this problem is to design the stations so that passengers enter on one side of the train and leave on the other. This is the way rides are designed at amusement parks to facilitate the movement of crowds.
Barring that, a system which direct passengers to debark at certain doors (such as at the front) and enter at other doors (At the back) will also work. This has been used on buses, where passengers exit at the back and enter at the front (where they pay.)
The use of AI in this case may indeed result in fewer accidents resulting from moving trains hitting passengers in exclusion zones, but it will do nothing for keeping trains on time.
Fair enough. But I would say that these are examples of the scientific method working as it should. Mistakes or fraud may take time to detect, but sooner or later they are corrected.
And keep in mind that science is not the only human endeavour that has occasionally wasted time, money, and effort. Science progresses most efficiently when honest actors work together in good faith, scrutinizing each other's work but also building mutual trust. The waste from occasional bad actors is eclipsed by the benefit from the good ones.
That's all very well when science is relegated to its own little corner of the universe interested only in unimportant issues like when did the universe begin or is there life on some distance planet which will be unreachable for the next big bite of eternity.
It's quite another thing when fraudulent science is used to direct public policy which has an immediate and negative effect on people's actual lives. It is even more a problem when fraudulent science is used to precipitate cultural change that effects whole populations.
I absolutely should have the right to offend others. If you don't have the right to offend others then you don't really have freedom of speech.
It's easy to defend the speech rights of people with whom you agree, but unless you defend the right of free speech of people with whom you don't agree then you really don't believe in freedom of speech.
Don't worry a la carte is coming, but you won't like it.
All the major content providers are beginning to distribute their content through their own streaming services. Each of which wants to charge what you're probably already paying for Netflix or Hulu. So instead of getting content from many providrs like you now get from Netflix or Hulu you'll only get content from CBS or Disney or WB on each stream. To get it all you'll be paying as much or more than you now pay for cable. And you'll have to pay for an ISP besides, and probably a cell data plan too.
So be careful what you ask for. it's sure to cost you more.
You obviously don't understand how Social Security works. Does the phrase Ponzi Scheme mean anything to you? Social; Security is a Ponzi Scheme. It isn't "your money" once you give it to the government. It's a kind of tax that's used to pay people already receiving Social Security. It's a tax paid by you and your employer to allow people already receiving Social Security to be paid.
When the program was started the people to first receive Social Security payments hadn't paid in anything. They qualified because they were breathing and above a certain age. It was Roosevelt's scheme to lower the unemployment numbers by paying people to leave the workforce. In some way it's purpose is still to do that.
"Your money" doesn't get put into a bank account, investment account or even a piggy bank. The majority of it is used to pay people now on Social Security. The rest is spent by the government as part of the general fund.
As the ratio of retired workers to working workers increases the scheme will unravel as do all Ponzi Schemes.
Nice deflection. Unfortunately anyone who actually knows history knows that the socialist and Nazi's in the 1930's were separate branches of the socialist movement.
Hitler parted ways first with them (the SPD) and then with the SA of his own party.
The identification of the Nazi with the right was and is a tactic of the left used to paint conservatism and the right in general as espousing Nazi beliefs, which is of course, false.
Under the present political alignment the laissez-faire policies of right has more to do with classical liberalism than the income redistribution policies of left does. In any meaningful way conservatism is the political heir of classical liberalism and in no way related to Nazism or any form of fascism.
You've got it backwards. When you install the app it asks for permissions to access this that and the other. Most times if you say "no" the app doesn't work. If you say yes the app phones home and the server knows you've installed the app.
Now every so often the server uses push notifications to query the app. If it gets no response it assumes you've uninstalled it, since it won't work anyway if you block notifications and data access.
So yes you have controlled over whether you install the app or not. If you don't install it it won't call home. If you install it and don't let it call home it won't work, so presumably you will uninstall it. Either way since you searched for it in the playstore presumably you were interested. Since you downloaded you were interested. They can tell those things from the server side. No magic involved.