The study doesn't mention 'exercise' as a factor in changing your personality after birth: the brain you are born with affects the personality you exhibit in life, and that's it.
That's reading too much into this study. The idea that brain you have is what you're stuck with was the state of neuroscience when I went to college in the late 70s, but remember this was before researchers could image a brain in a living subject. Extrapolating from the lack of recovery of people with spinal cord injuries the belief was that nerve cells just didn't grow or multiply in an adult -- and they certainly didn't change function. Now we know from imaging studies and from clinical histories of brain damage patients that the brain absolutely does change itself, and parts even grow in size in response to effort, like a weightlifter's muscles. There have also been people who received hemisphectomies who regained vision and motor function that was handled by the half of the brain that was removed. This necessarily entails a massive remodeling of the remaining brain.
So the good news is that even if you are your brain, you can still grow because parts of your brain can literally grow.
I think the innovative thing about Siri is that it was quite a bit smarter about understanding humans' context-dependent grammar than what came before. This make it a lot more natural to use.
Yes. For one thing, non-profit universities don't have proprietors to retain earnings. The ultimate management authority in any corporation is the board, and the boards of non-profit universities are unpaid.
That doesn't mean money isn't important. It's very important.
People keep harping on this because Trump insists on feeling hurt by it. And acting hurt diminishes his status and prestige. Simple as that.
If it were me, I'd say, "I never expected a record turnout. My supporters have to work for a living." But instead Mr. Trump lies, which gives the media the thing they love about him: an easy story. Mr. Trump can't resist taking the bait. It's a weakness, and his enemies will exploit it again and again, until even people who don't follow politics very much are thoroughly sick of Trump. And then it will carry on.
I will posit something about a good president: absent some kind of dire national emergency, people who don't get off on politics can pretty much ignore his existence. Trump won't be one of those.
I'm aware of these things. But if anything this means there's no need to gild the lily. Overblown reactions don't stop him, if anything they help him. Mr. Trump works by piling on the BS so fast you're constantly working on yesterday's news.
It's important to set priorities, and I'd say priority should go to the things which have no reasonable excuse, especially as there's no shortage of them (e.g. Trump's suggestion that he may use the CIA to seize Iraq's oil. Even if that weren't really bad foreign policy, it's a patently moronic idea, like invading Switzerland and taking all the chocolate.
The first thing you have to establish is what is the basis you want to judge by: The good of society? The good of the students? The good of the faculty or the administration? The good of human knowledge as a whole? These all lead to fundamentally different ways of evaluating the question.
I should point out that not every institution of higher learning has the same purpose. A for-profit institution like University of Phoenix exists to turn its proprietors a buck. The very reason for an academic department to exist is to be a profit center, and if it can't pull its weight, either due insufficient pull (Classics) or excessive weight (engineering), it doesn't have a right to exist. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Jesuit colleges which exist to glorify God by cultivating each individual student's God-given talents.
I see no intrinsic need for all majors to cost the same. But the whether it's a good idea depends on your mission, your strategy for accomplishing it, and the resources at your disposal. It may well come down to what you can afford to do.
Every time there's an administration change, particular with a party change, there's a limbo period where positions of the department are undefined. My brother-in-law was a fisheries scientist and he met with Congressmen after Bush came in in 2000; except for the barest facts he wasn't able to offer them any opinions or interpretations of fact because what the facts meant hadn't been determined by the administration.
This in itself wasn't sinister. But what was dangerous was an attitude that emerged later in that administration, a belief that if you're sufficiently powerful you can create a new reality by force of will alone. And while there is an element of truth in that -- what people believe can be shaped by the bold and decisive exercise of power -- what's dangerous is that that isn't reality, it's just perception.
This incident by itself feels like a bit of post-transition chaos... But there are other troubling early signs of parting ways with the very concept of objective truth where it is inconvenient. And that is troubling. A society which has no belief in objective reality can entertain no meaningful concept of liberty.
We need to decide what an administration owes to us in terms of information. Should they be allowed to lie about facts? Offer us opinions that they themselves don't actually believe? I suspect sincerity may be too much to ask from any politician, but we really ought to insist on facts being fully and faithfully rendered. These people are supposed to be public servants, not rulers.
I don't think Amazon even thinks what it's doing that way.
Amazon's corporate philosophy I think can be summed up this way: Bezos wants Amazon to do everything and win at it. It wants to sell books. It wants to publish books. It wants to stream video and produce the content it is streaming, and provide infrastructure for its competitors like Netflix -- and devices upon which consumers play that content. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a virtual manufacturer of things like cars -- it already sells them.
So a win here wouldn't be a win for Amazon as a streaming service; it'd be a win in its quest to play a role in everything people consume.
If I were picking a number out of thin air I'd certainly go higher. The question is how he arrived at that number, and I suspect economies of scale have something to do with it. Scale can do funny things to your calculations. Things can get harder, then easier, then harder again as you go up.
I once had a colleague whose first engineering job out of college was to do a reverse engineering specification on a prototype submersible; the Navy was pleased with the low cost of the prototype and thought it might like a second one. The problem was that the prototype was made by scrounging surplus bits and pieces; building a second one that was exactly the same would have cost 10x as much because you'd have to hunt down an exact replacement for each part. But if you were building a 100 units, you probably could do it for 100x the cost, because you could amortize the project's fixed costs over more units: source the odd parts, reverse engineering them if necessary, or doing design revisions with an eye to making it reproducible.
I too find it hard to believe that there is any empirical justification for trying this. That said, I'd like to know what they think indicates this will work. I'm wondering whether they might be dealing with some kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc scenario where cloud seeding efforts coincided with changing rainfall patterns.
In any case, the place they're trying this appears to be Qinhai Province, up on the Tibetan Plateau. The population density there 7.8/km^2 -- roughly similar to Wyoming (5.97/km^2).
Under Obama, we stopped counting people as unemployed if they gave up looking for a job. Such people are difficult to track is the argument.
Actually unemployment has always been calculated that way. It's the way economists do the calculation, not some kind of nefarious political innovation.
As for tracking the people who give up looking, the labor department does track them. How else do you know that the participation rate is low? The thing is that while unemployment (as it has always been reckoned) has recovered to pre-Great Recessions levels, participation rates remain unusually low, and that's just something you have to take into account when you're comparing unemployment rates in 2008 to 2016: the denominator has a distinctly different character.
What really gets interesting is if you look at who is not participating. The lions' share of non-participants are Boomers nearing retirement. This isn't a happy statistic, however. I think it reflect the synergistic effects of age discrimination and long-term unemployment. We also have high rates of underemployment as well -- people who are highly skilled working low-skill jobs for example.
The overall picture is mixed, fair-to-good-ish for many but extremely grim for sizable numbers of people.
Who trust government data? Anybody who uses a USGS map. Or a weather forecast that uses satellite data. Or who uses a GPS (both the satellite signal and the base map, which is compiled by private companies from government sources).
Now any statistic is capable of misleading, if you choose to misinterpret it. Take unemployment. I think that figure is accurate, it just doesn't mean what people think it does. By 2016 unemployment had recovered to where it was before the Great Recession, but if you think that means the government is fraudulently telling you that the job picture is good, that's you misinterpreting what it means. The low unemployment rate masks (a) relatively low labor participation and (b) disastrously low job growth and labor participation in certain regions of the country -- particularly rural and small to middle-sized cities. How do I know this? Well, government data, obviously.
You are conflating "data", with "information" and "opinion". The Food Pyramid is opinion, not data. If you think for yourself and drill down into the facts a bit, you'll find that government data is pretty useful. Opinions, less so.
If you think that the Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility I suggest you go back and look at the changes in Federal deficits by fiscal year when they are in charge. Note that if a president takes office in FY X, FY X+1 is the first budget he submits and FY X+2 is the first budget that fully reflects his priorities.
Japan's maglev system is proven technology, already at the low end of the Hyperloop speed range and projected to reach over 900km/h in time. Hyperloop is expected to hit around 1200km/h, so I just can't see the benefit being great enough to outweigh the disadvantages.
The reason to choose Hyperloop over Maglev isn't speed, it's projected cost. Musk thinks he can build the things for $11 million/km. That's about a quarter of what maglev would cost -- assuming that Hyperloop even works.
There isn't a lot to choose between 30 minutes LA to San Francisco and 45 minutes. Over longer haul routes the technology is supposed to eventually go much, much faster than maglev, but the key in the near future will be to beat maglev on cost over medium distances. And to actually work.
As for comfort, Hyperloop proposes to turn intercity travel into something more like a cross city subway ride. In fact (assuming it works) you'll be able to get from New York to Washington DC in less time than it takes to cross Brooklyn on the MTA.
Solar is getting no where near to the price of coal. We're still paying 0.528kWh for solar here in Ontario, the price we were paying for coal when the last plant shut down was 0.043kWh.
Of course when you're shutting down coal power plants the price of coal is going to drop. Canadian coal demand dropped by 45% in the ten years prior to Thunder Bay shutting down, you have to look at those prices in the context of a collapsing domestic market. Coal prices would have been much higher with stable or growing domestic demand.
Latitude and climate also affect the cost of solar, and last time I checked most of the population of the US (which is the country we're talking about here) is south of Ontario. Solar is much, much cheaper in Florida for example. But even where I live in Massachusetts (same latitude as SW Ontario) you can get rooftop solar panels for US $2.50 / watt (6.25 Canadian) if you pay for them yourself and your house is favorably situated. That means to beat the Can $0.043/kwh benchmark, solar panels here in Boston have to run for about ten years. Solar panels have an expected service life of thirty years.
Of course when you get into realistic economics things get complicated. But a lot of my engineer friends have chosen to pull the trigger on rooftop solar, and they aren't afraid of doing ROI calculations. It's not for everyone yet, nor is it a solution for everything. But it's economical for some people in just about every part of the continental US, and that's a significant development.
If you are a true master, you should be able to explain concepts in a way that even a child can understand
This is, in a word, horse pucky. It's the same reasoning my niece uses to justify her anti-vaxxer beliefs: the quacks and charlatans she listens to are more credible than epidemiologists and immunologists because they're easier to understand. This is the real-life equivalent of the joke about searching for the $20 bill under the street light because where you actually lost it is inconveniently dark.
If it were true that a child could understand anything, there wouldn't be a need for education. You'd just find a "true expert" to explain, say, fluid dynamics to a random bunch of people off the street and then set those randos to work designing aircraft. Or cryptographic systems.
There's an unfortunate cultural trend to devalue anything that requires mental effort and dedication to understand as elitist bullshit. This is a dangerous development, especially when combined with our national vanity: ever since the Moon landing we see technological and scientific leadership as a birthright. It's not. It's something we have to earn, and continue earning every day by dint of hard labor.
The humbling truth is that real understanding in many things requires trekking a long and arduous road. It's a near certainty that you don't actually understand General Relativity; crude analogies about balls and rubber sheets notwithstanding. General Relativity is like a mountain that looks easy to tackle from a great distance, but the fact is it takes years of toil before you can even grasp how arduous the foothills of Mount Einstein are.
It would be nice if people could learn to think in terms of threats that fell somewhere between "safe to ignore" and "extinction level event". Or could distinguish between "extreme and expensive" responses and "effective" ones.
9/11 could have been prevented by simple, conservative and inexpensive countermeasures. After 9/11 politicians droned on about how "9/11 changed everything," but the cold sober fact was that it in fact changed nothing. It just showed that some of the things sensible people had already been telling us to do (like reinforcing cockpit doors or getting agencies to work together despite institutional rivalries) really did need to be done. Instead "9/11 changed everything" became the rallying cry for every pet scheme that had heretofore been correctly dismissed as too expensive, hare-brained, or just plain dumb.
Which doesn't change the fact that something needed to be done. Here's the lesson I think we should take into this infrastructure debate: we should take sensible and conservative steps to secure infrastructure against terrorism now, before events put foolish ones on the table.
Or... what if anytime anyone called a residential number, a nickel was transferred from the caller's account to the callee's account.
That wouldn't stop anyone from making a call where an actual person is likely to be involved; the labor costs for a three minute conversation would swamp that. But it would discourage people from robocalling a hundred thousand people in order to turn up a handful of suckers.
And the public wouldn't have to pay a regulator to try to track down these boiler room operations.
I don't have to do anything. Even stored under ideal circumstances li-ion batteries lose capacity.
What matter is capacity relative to demand. In a phone like the Droid Maxx from a few years ago with plenty of surplus battery the phone will still be usable four years later. But something like a Samsung Galaxy S6 barely has enough battery to make it through the day when brand new and is pretty much unusable two years later even under ideal conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
The study doesn't mention 'exercise' as a factor in changing your personality after birth: the brain you are born with affects the personality you exhibit in life, and that's it.
That's reading too much into this study. The idea that brain you have is what you're stuck with was the state of neuroscience when I went to college in the late 70s, but remember this was before researchers could image a brain in a living subject. Extrapolating from the lack of recovery of people with spinal cord injuries the belief was that nerve cells just didn't grow or multiply in an adult -- and they certainly didn't change function. Now we know from imaging studies and from clinical histories of brain damage patients that the brain absolutely does change itself, and parts even grow in size in response to effort, like a weightlifter's muscles. There have also been people who received hemisphectomies who regained vision and motor function that was handled by the half of the brain that was removed. This necessarily entails a massive remodeling of the remaining brain.
So the good news is that even if you are your brain, you can still grow because parts of your brain can literally grow.
Zero Dark Thirty was a work of fiction.
Obama banned waterboarding on his second day in office (executive order 13491).
I think the innovative thing about Siri is that it was quite a bit smarter about understanding humans' context-dependent grammar than what came before. This make it a lot more natural to use.
Yes. For one thing, non-profit universities don't have proprietors to retain earnings. The ultimate management authority in any corporation is the board, and the boards of non-profit universities are unpaid.
That doesn't mean money isn't important. It's very important.
People keep harping on this because Trump insists on feeling hurt by it. And acting hurt diminishes his status and prestige. Simple as that.
If it were me, I'd say, "I never expected a record turnout. My supporters have to work for a living." But instead Mr. Trump lies, which gives the media the thing they love about him: an easy story. Mr. Trump can't resist taking the bait. It's a weakness, and his enemies will exploit it again and again, until even people who don't follow politics very much are thoroughly sick of Trump. And then it will carry on.
I will posit something about a good president: absent some kind of dire national emergency, people who don't get off on politics can pretty much ignore his existence. Trump won't be one of those.
I'm aware of these things. But if anything this means there's no need to gild the lily. Overblown reactions don't stop him, if anything they help him. Mr. Trump works by piling on the BS so fast you're constantly working on yesterday's news.
It's important to set priorities, and I'd say priority should go to the things which have no reasonable excuse, especially as there's no shortage of them (e.g. Trump's suggestion that he may use the CIA to seize Iraq's oil. Even if that weren't really bad foreign policy, it's a patently moronic idea, like invading Switzerland and taking all the chocolate.
The first thing you have to establish is what is the basis you want to judge by: The good of society? The good of the students? The good of the faculty or the administration? The good of human knowledge as a whole? These all lead to fundamentally different ways of evaluating the question.
I should point out that not every institution of higher learning has the same purpose. A for-profit institution like University of Phoenix exists to turn its proprietors a buck. The very reason for an academic department to exist is to be a profit center, and if it can't pull its weight, either due insufficient pull (Classics) or excessive weight (engineering), it doesn't have a right to exist. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Jesuit colleges which exist to glorify God by cultivating each individual student's God-given talents.
I see no intrinsic need for all majors to cost the same. But the whether it's a good idea depends on your mission, your strategy for accomplishing it, and the resources at your disposal. It may well come down to what you can afford to do.
I think we need to see.
Every time there's an administration change, particular with a party change, there's a limbo period where positions of the department are undefined. My brother-in-law was a fisheries scientist and he met with Congressmen after Bush came in in 2000; except for the barest facts he wasn't able to offer them any opinions or interpretations of fact because what the facts meant hadn't been determined by the administration.
This in itself wasn't sinister. But what was dangerous was an attitude that emerged later in that administration, a belief that if you're sufficiently powerful you can create a new reality by force of will alone. And while there is an element of truth in that -- what people believe can be shaped by the bold and decisive exercise of power -- what's dangerous is that that isn't reality, it's just perception.
This incident by itself feels like a bit of post-transition chaos... But there are other troubling early signs of parting ways with the very concept of objective truth where it is inconvenient. And that is troubling. A society which has no belief in objective reality can entertain no meaningful concept of liberty.
We need to decide what an administration owes to us in terms of information. Should they be allowed to lie about facts? Offer us opinions that they themselves don't actually believe? I suspect sincerity may be too much to ask from any politician, but we really ought to insist on facts being fully and faithfully rendered. These people are supposed to be public servants, not rulers.
Science is not about a priori knowledge.
I don't think Amazon even thinks what it's doing that way.
Amazon's corporate philosophy I think can be summed up this way: Bezos wants Amazon to do everything and win at it. It wants to sell books. It wants to publish books. It wants to stream video and produce the content it is streaming, and provide infrastructure for its competitors like Netflix -- and devices upon which consumers play that content. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a virtual manufacturer of things like cars -- it already sells them.
So a win here wouldn't be a win for Amazon as a streaming service; it'd be a win in its quest to play a role in everything people consume.
If I were picking a number out of thin air I'd certainly go higher. The question is how he arrived at that number, and I suspect economies of scale have something to do with it. Scale can do funny things to your calculations. Things can get harder, then easier, then harder again as you go up.
I once had a colleague whose first engineering job out of college was to do a reverse engineering specification on a prototype submersible; the Navy was pleased with the low cost of the prototype and thought it might like a second one. The problem was that the prototype was made by scrounging surplus bits and pieces; building a second one that was exactly the same would have cost 10x as much because you'd have to hunt down an exact replacement for each part. But if you were building a 100 units, you probably could do it for 100x the cost, because you could amortize the project's fixed costs over more units: source the odd parts, reverse engineering them if necessary, or doing design revisions with an eye to making it reproducible.
Justifications are not empirical. A justification can't be proven any more than justice can be proven to exist.
Well, you'd expect a justification to cite empirical evidence. Or have we lost the thread that badly?
I too find it hard to believe that there is any empirical justification for trying this. That said, I'd like to know what they think indicates this will work. I'm wondering whether they might be dealing with some kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc scenario where cloud seeding efforts coincided with changing rainfall patterns.
In any case, the place they're trying this appears to be Qinhai Province, up on the Tibetan Plateau. The population density there 7.8/km^2 -- roughly similar to Wyoming (5.97/km^2).
Under Obama, we stopped counting people as unemployed if they gave up looking for a job. Such people are difficult to track is the argument.
Actually unemployment has always been calculated that way. It's the way economists do the calculation, not some kind of nefarious political innovation.
As for tracking the people who give up looking, the labor department does track them. How else do you know that the participation rate is low? The thing is that while unemployment (as it has always been reckoned) has recovered to pre-Great Recessions levels, participation rates remain unusually low, and that's just something you have to take into account when you're comparing unemployment rates in 2008 to 2016: the denominator has a distinctly different character.
What really gets interesting is if you look at who is not participating. The lions' share of non-participants are Boomers nearing retirement. This isn't a happy statistic, however. I think it reflect the synergistic effects of age discrimination and long-term unemployment. We also have high rates of underemployment as well -- people who are highly skilled working low-skill jobs for example.
The overall picture is mixed, fair-to-good-ish for many but extremely grim for sizable numbers of people.
Who trust government data? Anybody who uses a USGS map. Or a weather forecast that uses satellite data. Or who uses a GPS (both the satellite signal and the base map, which is compiled by private companies from government sources).
Now any statistic is capable of misleading, if you choose to misinterpret it. Take unemployment. I think that figure is accurate, it just doesn't mean what people think it does. By 2016 unemployment had recovered to where it was before the Great Recession, but if you think that means the government is fraudulently telling you that the job picture is good, that's you misinterpreting what it means. The low unemployment rate masks (a) relatively low labor participation and (b) disastrously low job growth and labor participation in certain regions of the country -- particularly rural and small to middle-sized cities. How do I know this? Well, government data, obviously.
You are conflating "data", with "information" and "opinion". The Food Pyramid is opinion, not data. If you think for yourself and drill down into the facts a bit, you'll find that government data is pretty useful. Opinions, less so.
If you think that the Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility I suggest you go back and look at the changes in Federal deficits by fiscal year when they are in charge. Note that if a president takes office in FY X, FY X+1 is the first budget he submits and FY X+2 is the first budget that fully reflects his priorities.
That is not a matter of fact that is a matter of definition, something you should always take into account.
Japan's maglev system is proven technology, already at the low end of the Hyperloop speed range and projected to reach over 900km/h in time. Hyperloop is expected to hit around 1200km/h, so I just can't see the benefit being great enough to outweigh the disadvantages.
The reason to choose Hyperloop over Maglev isn't speed, it's projected cost. Musk thinks he can build the things for $11 million/km. That's about a quarter of what maglev would cost -- assuming that Hyperloop even works.
There isn't a lot to choose between 30 minutes LA to San Francisco and 45 minutes. Over longer haul routes the technology is supposed to eventually go much, much faster than maglev, but the key in the near future will be to beat maglev on cost over medium distances. And to actually work.
As for comfort, Hyperloop proposes to turn intercity travel into something more like a cross city subway ride. In fact (assuming it works) you'll be able to get from New York to Washington DC in less time than it takes to cross Brooklyn on the MTA.
Solar is getting no where near to the price of coal. We're still paying 0.528kWh for solar here in Ontario, the price we were paying for coal when the last plant shut down was 0.043kWh.
Of course when you're shutting down coal power plants the price of coal is going to drop. Canadian coal demand dropped by 45% in the ten years prior to Thunder Bay shutting down, you have to look at those prices in the context of a collapsing domestic market. Coal prices would have been much higher with stable or growing domestic demand.
Latitude and climate also affect the cost of solar, and last time I checked most of the population of the US (which is the country we're talking about here) is south of Ontario. Solar is much, much cheaper in Florida for example. But even where I live in Massachusetts (same latitude as SW Ontario) you can get rooftop solar panels for US $2.50 / watt (6.25 Canadian) if you pay for them yourself and your house is favorably situated. That means to beat the Can $0.043/kwh benchmark, solar panels here in Boston have to run for about ten years. Solar panels have an expected service life of thirty years.
Of course when you get into realistic economics things get complicated. But a lot of my engineer friends have chosen to pull the trigger on rooftop solar, and they aren't afraid of doing ROI calculations. It's not for everyone yet, nor is it a solution for everything. But it's economical for some people in just about every part of the continental US, and that's a significant development.
If you are a true master, you should be able to explain concepts in a way that even a child can understand
This is, in a word, horse pucky. It's the same reasoning my niece uses to justify her anti-vaxxer beliefs: the quacks and charlatans she listens to are more credible than epidemiologists and immunologists because they're easier to understand. This is the real-life equivalent of the joke about searching for the $20 bill under the street light because where you actually lost it is inconveniently dark.
If it were true that a child could understand anything, there wouldn't be a need for education. You'd just find a "true expert" to explain, say, fluid dynamics to a random bunch of people off the street and then set those randos to work designing aircraft. Or cryptographic systems.
There's an unfortunate cultural trend to devalue anything that requires mental effort and dedication to understand as elitist bullshit. This is a dangerous development, especially when combined with our national vanity: ever since the Moon landing we see technological and scientific leadership as a birthright. It's not. It's something we have to earn, and continue earning every day by dint of hard labor.
The humbling truth is that real understanding in many things requires trekking a long and arduous road. It's a near certainty that you don't actually understand General Relativity; crude analogies about balls and rubber sheets notwithstanding. General Relativity is like a mountain that looks easy to tackle from a great distance, but the fact is it takes years of toil before you can even grasp how arduous the foothills of Mount Einstein are.
It would be nice if people could learn to think in terms of threats that fell somewhere between "safe to ignore" and "extinction level event". Or could distinguish between "extreme and expensive" responses and "effective" ones.
9/11 could have been prevented by simple, conservative and inexpensive countermeasures. After 9/11 politicians droned on about how "9/11 changed everything," but the cold sober fact was that it in fact changed nothing. It just showed that some of the things sensible people had already been telling us to do (like reinforcing cockpit doors or getting agencies to work together despite institutional rivalries) really did need to be done. Instead "9/11 changed everything" became the rallying cry for every pet scheme that had heretofore been correctly dismissed as too expensive, hare-brained, or just plain dumb.
Which doesn't change the fact that something needed to be done. Here's the lesson I think we should take into this infrastructure debate: we should take sensible and conservative steps to secure infrastructure against terrorism now, before events put foolish ones on the table.
Those are what are known in statistics as "outliers". They can be safely thrown out, unless the conclusion you're after depends on them.
Or... what if anytime anyone called a residential number, a nickel was transferred from the caller's account to the callee's account.
That wouldn't stop anyone from making a call where an actual person is likely to be involved; the labor costs for a three minute conversation would swamp that. But it would discourage people from robocalling a hundred thousand people in order to turn up a handful of suckers.
And the public wouldn't have to pay a regulator to try to track down these boiler room operations.
I don't have to do anything. Even stored under ideal circumstances li-ion batteries lose capacity.
What matter is capacity relative to demand. In a phone like the Droid Maxx from a few years ago with plenty of surplus battery the phone will still be usable four years later. But something like a Samsung Galaxy S6 barely has enough battery to make it through the day when brand new and is pretty much unusable two years later even under ideal conditions.