They don't want people with great credit and great ability to pay up. They want people who can't pay it off, so will carry a balance and therefore pay interest, which is where the credit companies make their money.
If you're not quite able to pay off your card (so that interest keeps accruing), but can make regular payments and won't quite stiff 'em, that's their notion of an ideal customer.
A customer who keeps their credit card paid off all the time is just an expense.
1) It wasn't useful without running Windows on top of it so I'd have some reasonable array of apps, and the exact same app doing the exact same task not only used 4x the memory it did in plain Windows, and ran at about 1/4th the speed, it was also much more likely to freeze up. And any task that was prone to exhaust resources in Windows (which was generally recoverable if one closed the offending app) could be relied upon to crash Warp.
2) When (not if) Warp crashed, it was prone to nuke something it required to boot. I've forgotten the details, but I found a reference to the exact cause in the manual (so it was a known issue!), and tho getting it bootable again was an easy fix it was also tiresome to have to do it every other day.
So after a few days of this it was marked FAIL, and I went back to DOS/Windows. OS/2 must have merit as an embedded OS, or it wouldn't have any traction there in the first place. But it was no mystery to me why it never caught on as a desktop.
That may be, but it doesn't address how much bureaucracy is involved in getting to that point. It's not just collecting and redistributing someone else's money; it's paying for the employees and facilities required to do so. If they work in a nice building and are unionized and get benefits and retirement pensions (and show me somewhere that's not the case?) well, there's your overhead, and a great deal of the reason-for-being for many gov't programs.... if the program goes away, so do all those union jobs, and more to the point, so do the union dues (not to mention the union members and program recipients who can be relied on to vote Democrat).
What percentage of those 800 Euros is eaten by government overhead? In the U.S. that overhead is around 30%. My impression is that European gov'ts are if anything less efficient.
When I lived there (and voted against it) I vaguely recall the cost per projected rider was a piddly $1200 or so. What's it up to now? Or has it achieved "higher math"??
Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines continues to have direct flights for under $100.
That's the basic problem with the liberal mindset: everything is either/or. There's no ability to see that things might exist along a continuum. Just because one system is in some ways better than another doesn't mean "everything's OK".
(Tho I think the AC who responded to me makes a good point, even tho profit-based enforcement has its own difficulties; we used to call that "protection money".)
That's an interesting insight, and I think you've got a good point. I'm mostly familiar with what's coming out of the Los Angeles Police Academy, and there's a serious slant toward little tin gods. (And the women are worse than the men.)
One might consider that the U.S. is a weird hybrid of frontier and modern societal modes, not directly comparable to anywhere else.
But I'd like to hear firsthand experiences on cops in developed nations. Are they really any better, or is it a generally more-compliant populace? I recall a recent study that found Europeans are much more willing to just go along with authority, while Americans are far more likely to question it, and this contrast was especially marked when that authority overstepped its bounds (Europeans knuckle under; Americans rebel). It follows that one would expect American cops will expect more resistance from our less-compliant population, and are therefore more likely to be belligerent toward the public.
Or maybe it's that in the U.S., we still have the right and the balls to speak up against police misconduct, and aren't likely to disappear forever for doing so.
Yes, our cops are out of line, largely because they are being taught that the public is the enemy -- but compare, say, Mexican or Nigerian cops and ours suddenly look far better.
Fracking has been going on for 50+ years. But what records we have of earthquakes in North America are barely a blip in geological time. I think it's far too soon to be sure the one is to blame for the other.
Same thoughts here. When/if WinXP/2003 finally becomes nonviable (and the only way I can see that happening is if the majority of the internet vs older browsers becomes the chokepoint) -- sorry, I've tried Win7 and 8 and wasn't amused, and it is MY computer, not Win10's computer, so we ain't going there. This led to another of my periodic spasms of testing linux distros, and I was pleased to find a few are finally approaching my usability standards for an everyday OS. Mint is tolerable if, as you say, a bit clunky. PClinuxOS is pretty promising too (try the fullmonty edition). I still prefer WinXP but come to it, at this point I could live with linux... so long as KDE 4.x still runs. Wasn't at all impressed with KDE5, and none of the other DEs does it for me.
43 incidents per year is barely statistical noise. Far more toddlers are involved in auto-related accidents, and all manner of accidents around the home. As you say the problem isn't guns; it's the nature of toddlers vs human imperfections.
One of the problems with the "safety craze" is that instead of learning to look out for themselves, people now assume someone else will look out for them. So they don't teach their kids to be aware either... they only teach them to be afraid, which is not the same thing at all.
Savory is right; I've seen it in action with sheep in the desert. Where it was grazed by big commercial flocks several times a year, it was all native grass and flowers. When the sheep stopped coming, within three years it went to tumbleweeds and hardpan (despite being years with higher rainfall than average).
This might interest you as well:
The Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing (U. of Arizona research publication)
There was some interesting research on middle-aged women who suddenly decided "meat smells bad" and therefore became vegetarians... turned out this was directly caused by estrogen deficiency. (I suspect testosterone deficiency might have the same effect in males.) Likely their bodies were trying to make up the deficiency by seeking phytoestrogens (the human sense of smell being better than is usually credited), which can more or less substitute for animal estrogen.
Ditto from the 60 years age bracket, except rather than being an amateur athlete, I do physical work every day. And I've noticed how much better I feel when I get enough protein from red meat. (Fish and chicken don't cut it.)
But if I want to give myself gas and bloating and other symptoms of poor digestion, as well as chronic fatigue.... well, all I have to do is substitute beans for meat.
That's a load of bull. Even cattle that end their lives in feedlots spent most of it on the range, and every herd roams over thousands of acres -- just like bison did before them. (Actually, there were about 20% more bison in North America than there are now cattle.) In the same ecological niche. Grasses evolved to be grazed. When grassland is not grazed, it deteriorates to weeds and eventually to unproductive hardpan desert (which is rather different from a healthy --and grazed-- desert).
If this weren't so, explain why ranchers would pay property taxes on millions of acres of uncroppable western America, and grazing fees on land that's not even worth the property tax to own it, since in a great deal of the American west it takes 10 or even 100 acres to support one cow/calf pair, and that ground can't raise a plant-based crop at all. (Crops are much more profitable than livestock, thus if rural land =can= be cropped -- it generally already *is*.)
I liked Pilgrim of Eternity too. I thought it felt true to TOS, which seemed to be what they were going for over everything else. I was okay with that. It's a fan piece for and by fans, it'll do what the fans involved want to do. Which isn't necessarily broadcast-quality, but for the budget they've got? that's okay. If they had fun doing it, it's a success.
There are probably a dozen or so ongoing fan productions now, and all those I've seen have their merits. Some are more true to one or another incarnation of ST; some have better stories and/or acting or CGI. I haven't felt any were a waste of my viewing time, and some were downright excellent.
Regardless, I think these small productions are the future of entertainment; the big budget approach is tough to sustain. And I can think of any number of TV series I'd have loved to see continue at this level rather than die entirely when the network pulled the financial plug. If network productions could operate on a fan budget, maybe they'd be slower to nuke that show you love but costs more than it brings in advertising.
Saw an analysis the other day that boiled down to:
Site with ads: 5.5mb Same site without ads: 50k
Yes, 90% of the bandwidth was used by ads. This was for some major newspaper or magazine on the order of Business Week, not a site that exists solely to serve content-free advertising.
How is this fair to people who pay by the byte? I've seen phone data usage rates as high as $100/GB!!! and even if you're paying a more reasonable $5 or $10 per GB... it adds up fast. I've found that just for ordinary browsing on my PC, I can easily use as much as 1GB/day even without visiting YouTube.
Methinks it's time to start metering and billing advertisers who consume bandwidth that users have to pay for. Surely someone can code a phone app to do this.
I just read the book. Basic biology is somewhat lacking throughout. But potatoes are one of the few foods you can survive on indefinitely. They contain quite sufficient vitamin C to prevent scurvy.
Sufficient light to grow 'em would have been a problem, but if they can get by well enough to feed a nation even with Ireland's average cloud cover, perhaps a better choice than most crops. Might get one somewhat scanty crop, anyway. (I've seen 'em produce even when all the light they got was what leaked through broken boards into a closed shed.)
The bacteria issue was overblown; Watney could repopulate the whole place from his own colon, even if a large proportion didn't encapsulate as many bacteria do when stressed. And potatoes themselves are hardly sterile.
I did gather the author has never used freeze-dried food, including instant mashed potatoes.
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So, you're saying your brain runs linux? :)
They don't want people with great credit and great ability to pay up. They want people who can't pay it off, so will carry a balance and therefore pay interest, which is where the credit companies make their money.
If you're not quite able to pay off your card (so that interest keeps accruing), but can make regular payments and won't quite stiff 'em, that's their notion of an ideal customer.
A customer who keeps their credit card paid off all the time is just an expense.
I briefly ran Warp 3... briefly because
1) It wasn't useful without running Windows on top of it so I'd have some reasonable array of apps, and the exact same app doing the exact same task not only used 4x the memory it did in plain Windows, and ran at about 1/4th the speed, it was also much more likely to freeze up. And any task that was prone to exhaust resources in Windows (which was generally recoverable if one closed the offending app) could be relied upon to crash Warp.
2) When (not if) Warp crashed, it was prone to nuke something it required to boot. I've forgotten the details, but I found a reference to the exact cause in the manual (so it was a known issue!), and tho getting it bootable again was an easy fix it was also tiresome to have to do it every other day.
So after a few days of this it was marked FAIL, and I went back to DOS/Windows. OS/2 must have merit as an embedded OS, or it wouldn't have any traction there in the first place. But it was no mystery to me why it never caught on as a desktop.
That may be, but it doesn't address how much bureaucracy is involved in getting to that point. It's not just collecting and redistributing someone else's money; it's paying for the employees and facilities required to do so. If they work in a nice building and are unionized and get benefits and retirement pensions (and show me somewhere that's not the case?) well, there's your overhead, and a great deal of the reason-for-being for many gov't programs.... if the program goes away, so do all those union jobs, and more to the point, so do the union dues (not to mention the union members and program recipients who can be relied on to vote Democrat).
What percentage of those 800 Euros is eaten by government overhead? In the U.S. that overhead is around 30%. My impression is that European gov'ts are if anything less efficient.
Thanks for an insight I had not considered. I think you're on to something here.
When I lived there (and voted against it) I vaguely recall the cost per projected rider was a piddly $1200 or so. What's it up to now? Or has it achieved "higher math"??
Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines continues to have direct flights for under $100.
But when the project is finished, all those jobs go away.
So ideally, the project will never be finished. /sarcasm
The guy a few posts uphill is right. This is actually about skimming the public trough, and is therefore being done as inefficiently as possible.
That's the basic problem with the liberal mindset: everything is either/or. There's no ability to see that things might exist along a continuum. Just because one system is in some ways better than another doesn't mean "everything's OK".
(Tho I think the AC who responded to me makes a good point, even tho profit-based enforcement has its own difficulties; we used to call that "protection money".)
That's an interesting insight, and I think you've got a good point. I'm mostly familiar with what's coming out of the Los Angeles Police Academy, and there's a serious slant toward little tin gods. (And the women are worse than the men.)
One might consider that the U.S. is a weird hybrid of frontier and modern societal modes, not directly comparable to anywhere else.
But I'd like to hear firsthand experiences on cops in developed nations. Are they really any better, or is it a generally more-compliant populace? I recall a recent study that found Europeans are much more willing to just go along with authority, while Americans are far more likely to question it, and this contrast was especially marked when that authority overstepped its bounds (Europeans knuckle under; Americans rebel). It follows that one would expect American cops will expect more resistance from our less-compliant population, and are therefore more likely to be belligerent toward the public.
Or maybe it's that in the U.S., we still have the right and the balls to speak up against police misconduct, and aren't likely to disappear forever for doing so.
Yes, our cops are out of line, largely because they are being taught that the public is the enemy -- but compare, say, Mexican or Nigerian cops and ours suddenly look far better.
Same here.
And what happens when your phone is lost or stolen??
Fracking has been going on for 50+ years. But what records we have of earthquakes in North America are barely a blip in geological time. I think it's far too soon to be sure the one is to blame for the other.
Same thoughts here. When/if WinXP/2003 finally becomes nonviable (and the only way I can see that happening is if the majority of the internet vs older browsers becomes the chokepoint) -- sorry, I've tried Win7 and 8 and wasn't amused, and it is MY computer, not Win10's computer, so we ain't going there. This led to another of my periodic spasms of testing linux distros, and I was pleased to find a few are finally approaching my usability standards for an everyday OS. Mint is tolerable if, as you say, a bit clunky. PClinuxOS is pretty promising too (try the fullmonty edition). I still prefer WinXP but come to it, at this point I could live with linux... so long as KDE 4.x still runs. Wasn't at all impressed with KDE5, and none of the other DEs does it for me.
Maybe if you use a pirated key for your old Windows, the Win10 upgrade will go away and leave you alone...
And look at the earthquake map. Oklahoma is a specific region of regular moderate quakes. Nothing terribly unexpected going on here.
43 incidents per year is barely statistical noise. Far more toddlers are involved in auto-related accidents, and all manner of accidents around the home. As you say the problem isn't guns; it's the nature of toddlers vs human imperfections.
One of the problems with the "safety craze" is that instead of learning to look out for themselves, people now assume someone else will look out for them. So they don't teach their kids to be aware either... they only teach them to be afraid, which is not the same thing at all.
Savory is right; I've seen it in action with sheep in the desert. Where it was grazed by big commercial flocks several times a year, it was all native grass and flowers. When the sheep stopped coming, within three years it went to tumbleweeds and hardpan (despite being years with higher rainfall than average).
This might interest you as well:
The Desert Tortoise in Relation to Cattle Grazing
(U. of Arizona research publication)
https://journals.uair.arizona....
TL;DR: the more cattle graze the desert, the more tortoises there are -- because they don't eat plants; they eat dung.
There was some interesting research on middle-aged women who suddenly decided "meat smells bad" and therefore became vegetarians... turned out this was directly caused by estrogen deficiency. (I suspect testosterone deficiency might have the same effect in males.) Likely their bodies were trying to make up the deficiency by seeking phytoestrogens (the human sense of smell being better than is usually credited), which can more or less substitute for animal estrogen.
Ditto from the 60 years age bracket, except rather than being an amateur athlete, I do physical work every day. And I've noticed how much better I feel when I get enough protein from red meat. (Fish and chicken don't cut it.)
But if I want to give myself gas and bloating and other symptoms of poor digestion, as well as chronic fatigue.... well, all I have to do is substitute beans for meat.
That's a load of bull. Even cattle that end their lives in feedlots spent most of it on the range, and every herd roams over thousands of acres -- just like bison did before them. (Actually, there were about 20% more bison in North America than there are now cattle.) In the same ecological niche. Grasses evolved to be grazed. When grassland is not grazed, it deteriorates to weeds and eventually to unproductive hardpan desert (which is rather different from a healthy --and grazed-- desert).
If this weren't so, explain why ranchers would pay property taxes on millions of acres of uncroppable western America, and grazing fees on land that's not even worth the property tax to own it, since in a great deal of the American west it takes 10 or even 100 acres to support one cow/calf pair, and that ground can't raise a plant-based crop at all. (Crops are much more profitable than livestock, thus if rural land =can= be cropped -- it generally already *is*.)
I liked Pilgrim of Eternity too. I thought it felt true to TOS, which seemed to be what they were going for over everything else. I was okay with that. It's a fan piece for and by fans, it'll do what the fans involved want to do. Which isn't necessarily broadcast-quality, but for the budget they've got? that's okay. If they had fun doing it, it's a success.
There are probably a dozen or so ongoing fan productions now, and all those I've seen have their merits. Some are more true to one or another incarnation of ST; some have better stories and/or acting or CGI. I haven't felt any were a waste of my viewing time, and some were downright excellent.
Regardless, I think these small productions are the future of entertainment; the big budget approach is tough to sustain. And I can think of any number of TV series I'd have loved to see continue at this level rather than die entirely when the network pulled the financial plug. If network productions could operate on a fan budget, maybe they'd be slower to nuke that show you love but costs more than it brings in advertising.
Saw an analysis the other day that boiled down to:
Site with ads: 5.5mb
Same site without ads: 50k
Yes, 90% of the bandwidth was used by ads. This was for some major newspaper or magazine on the order of Business Week, not a site that exists solely to serve content-free advertising.
How is this fair to people who pay by the byte? I've seen phone data usage rates as high as $100/GB!!! and even if you're paying a more reasonable $5 or $10 per GB... it adds up fast. I've found that just for ordinary browsing on my PC, I can easily use as much as 1GB/day even without visiting YouTube.
Methinks it's time to start metering and billing advertisers who consume bandwidth that users have to pay for. Surely someone can code a phone app to do this.
I just read the book. Basic biology is somewhat lacking throughout. But potatoes are one of the few foods you can survive on indefinitely. They contain quite sufficient vitamin C to prevent scurvy.
http://www.potatogoodness.com/...
Sufficient light to grow 'em would have been a problem, but if they can get by well enough to feed a nation even with Ireland's average cloud cover, perhaps a better choice than most crops. Might get one somewhat scanty crop, anyway. (I've seen 'em produce even when all the light they got was what leaked through broken boards into a closed shed.)
The bacteria issue was overblown; Watney could repopulate the whole place from his own colon, even if a large proportion didn't encapsulate as many bacteria do when stressed. And potatoes themselves are hardly sterile.
I did gather the author has never used freeze-dried food, including instant mashed potatoes.