It rains a lot in Florida, Southern California on the other hand is a desert and it almost never rains. So even if Florida is slightly further south and gets a little bit more direct sunshine more of that sunshine likely reaches the ground in Southern California due to the lack of cloud cover.
Be careful with Buffalo, they have switched major components before with just a version number that sometimes didn't even appear on the box. There are versions of the same router that aren't supported by OpenWRT and DD-WRT because they swapped in a cheaper component that wasn't Linux compatible. People opened the box and found nasty surprises. I'd always wait a while after Buffalo releases a product then watch the reviews before you purchase to make sure they haven't pulled a WZR-HP-AG300NH again.
I say this as an owner of the router I quoted but I got lucky and got the right version but I was only a month away from being one of the people that got burned.
I don't like calling it kinetic energy as that generally means linear motion for a particle, the particles are vibrating and that level of vibration is the temperature. The higher the vibration the more likely it is to react with surrounding particles through accidental collisions. Zero Kelvin is supposed to be the point where all the vibration stops and the particle is no longer vibrating.
You quote from another brokerage report - who undoubtedly has interest in pushing this out to clients of certain stocks it holds positions in.
Attack the source when the numbers don't say what you want them to say. Get real. I've seen numerous reports from all over the country from dozens of different groups that say solar can be installed without subsidy cheaper than current nuclear and within striking distance of even the cheapest natural gas.
A neighbor recently had me sit in on a presentation by a local solar installer. Were it not for the various rebates and credits (some of which are lost if you are low income) the "pay back" period would be significantly longer, on the order of 10 years.
A 10 year payback is about a 6% ROI. That's a phenominal rate of return. After 10 years you are guaranteed 15 years of free power. That's the panel warranty. The panels will last longer than that.
And I wonder who will be around to make good on those 25 year guarantees?
The same people making them today. Every company that made solar panels in the 1980's is still making solar panels.
Further, solar DOES NOT WORK IN A BLACK OUT because it feeds back into the grid.
Horseshit. How the solar is connected to the grid is entirely dependent on local codes, net metering rules and what equipment is installed. There is no requirement that your panels stop generating power, only that you can't feed power back into the grid. With an automatic transfer switch that disconnects you from the utility in the event of power failure you can still feed your own circuits.
Everything you've said is full of misinformation and outright deceptions. It's so blatant it's almost as if you are a paid sock puppet.
That's great that you believe it. Too bad your beliefs and reality are so different.
A few facts for you, installed solar PV per year is growing at 400% per year for the last 5 years. Costs are declining about 20% per year. You can currently go out right now and find a company in your town that will provide, install and maintain PV panels on your roof for a guaranteed electricity price that is LOWER than what you currently pay and is fixed for 10 years (the loan is a monthly payment that will be cheaper than the power cost it offsets over a year). At the end of the 10 years you own the panels outright and all the power generated until they fail is FREE. PV panels routinely come with a 25 year warranty that guarantees they will provide 80% of their rated power for 25 years. Most PV panels lose about 0.5% of power output per year with no known lifetime, they could in fact last 100 years for all we know.
Right now, without subsidy Solar PV is cheaper than nuclear power per KW/hr. If the price of panels continues to decline at the same rate it has for the last 5 years by 2020 Solar PV will be cheaper than Coal without subsidy. The absolute only thing holding back Solar PV from storming up and down our grid is the up and down nature of it's generation. Tack reasonably priced storage on and that goes out the window. As solar gains traction manufacturing capacity will ramp up and costs will continue to decline. There are a lot of very rich people betting on solar. Companies like Solar City are routinely turning down hundreds of millions of investor money because they simply can't hire enough people to install that many panels.
Low level employees don't know diddly. This type of accounting fraud is highly complex and not even accountants can spot it when reviewing the books, that's how insidious and dangerous it is. This is how Enron concealed their fraud, they created several hundred companies with no apparent ties to the parent company, they then booked fraudulent sales, put bogus debt numbers into accounts receivable and booked fake loans to the company.
It's impossible to unravel this stuff if you don't know these companies are actually owned by the company cooking the books because it appears to be a separate company to the accountants and it's status is deliberately concealed (registered with fake names in foreign jurisdictions). The tactics used are right out of a mafia playbook for concealing and laundering money. You have to be specially trained to spot this type of behavior and its telltale signs, it's what forensic accountants specialize in and even then it can take months of digging to unravel what's going on.
That's the problem, no one but the person in charge of the building the scam is 2 cents the wiser. Up until Enron crashed and burned, their accountants and all their employees (6000 people) had no idea what Ken Lay, Shilling and the complicit CFO had done. You say talk to low level employees I say look at the 6000 employees of Enron that had almost all their life savings in the stock and tell me how many had any idea the company was going under until the cash flow problems started.
We can't have accurate accounting where one party in the system is willing to basically commit fraud and cook the books. Accounting is as much an art as a science and it is incredibly easy to commit fraud and create fraudulent sets of books. The basis of the entire stock market is that these companies aren't trying to deliberately defraud people to increase their own pocketbooks. That's why we need to throw the book at people that do this and put them in deep dark holes and take every cent they have. The damage it could do our economy if this became even slightly common would be enormous.
If the keys are stored on the box in any way then they are compromised because the box is. The synology box is rooted, any information stored on that box is compromised. If for example your root key for S3 is backed up on the NAS then it's compromised.
People are glossing over this, if the box is rooted everything it knows and stores is compromised, that's how people need to be analyzing this instead of blowing it off as no big deal.
You do realize that for the S3 backup to work Synology or the NAS (and the NAS has you Synology login info) has your login information for S3, and that if this thing is owning the NAS there is a pretty damn good chance the malware has owned your S3 instance as well right? The only way it wouldn't is if the S3 backup is totally manual.
If your accounting is violating all the rules it's possible to hide the real accounting information from everyone. Look at what Enron did with layers of fake companies that weren't on the books holding all the bad debt. When you go to that level of fraud the only people that are going to be able to unravel it are forensic accountants and months of fine toothed combs. The system is gameable because it operates on a system of trust, when these CEO's and accountants are willing to go to the level of full on accounting fraud the system we have doesn't work because it always assumed we had rational players that aren't two bit scammers. The degrading of ethics in business school has apparently turned that on it ear.
Maybe the answer is for these accounting firms to hire real forensic accountants to analyze companies. But if we've reached that point it's even scarier than you can imagine. What I think we need to do is be putting these CEO's and CFO's in jail, for 15-30 years and assigning high enough criminal penalties and restitution to ensure they are broke when they get out. Sarbanes-Oxley gave them the teeth to make that happen, the problem is right now Crime pays. The justice department should be investigating everyone involved.
Are you kidding? The people that tie steel for a living are lifting more than 50lbs at a time for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I'd bet better than 10% of our populations is constantly lifting and moving that kind of weight around pretty much continuously for their entire career.
What are you, a basement dwelling virgin who can barely lift 10lbs?
The only time 50 or even 100lbs should be a problem is if the shape is awkward (too long and wide, etc), the edges are sharp or the center of mass and shape make it awkward to hold (such as requiring that you hold the weight with your fingers rather than your arms). All but the sharp edges are usually neutralized by getting multiple people to move it. Now you start talking 100+ pounds in either dense or awkard shapes and this could be very helpful but 75lbs is nothing.
We both said we would defend Ukraine's borders too, with a pen and everything. (FWIW, I'm in favor of economic pressures as they're more effective long term, unless you are willing to go the distance (MAD-nukes).
At the time the treaty was signed the US and Nato were the threat and the Russians were the solution to the threat. The US and Nato agreed to never invade and the Russians agreed to use their Nukes to guarantee that. The Russians alone violated their portion of the treaty. The US and Nato had no obligation under the treaty to defend Ukraine's borders, only to respect them which we have done by continuing to no recognize the seizure of Crimea.
The US isn't going to invade China, ever. That whole never get involved in a land war in Asia thing applies even if we didn't appear to know that before Afghanistan we certainly know it now.
Any war with China will be Naval and focused on the east China sea and the straight through the south china sea. The US navy is at least 20 years ahead of the Chinese PLA Naval forces. Any battle is going to be focused on the US Navy blockading Chinese shipping and starving their economy.
As far as the parents claim that China doesn't believe they could beat the US they are wrong. China has been running articles in the communist party rag about how they could keep America out of any battle through diplomatic and economic pressure. They seem to believe their 1.2 trillion in debt is leverage. They also believe that their anti-ship missiles could neutralize the US Navy in an actual shooting battle.
The drug is NOT ready. That's the whole point of this. They were given experimental "serum" which had not even reached Human trials (years away from them in fact, they had just recently reached simian trials after the mouse models which is essentially the very first step towards human trials). This stuff could have outright killed them. These two people subjected themselves to essentially untested experimentation in the hope of a miracle. They got lucky.
Had they tested this stuff on a bunch of Africans and they died can you imagine the bad press it would have generated? I can see the headlines now. "America tests drugs on poor Africans in unethical medical experimentation".
And you aren't willing to pay for it. You forgot to add that point. And that little point make a HUGE difference.
The whole point of journalism is that they cover everything then put it in sections and you read the sections you want. When you are no longer willing to pay for any of it and you restrict access to those that tailor it to your views you've just asked for infotainment and the ego stroking that comprises most "news" these days. Fox news is so successful (or was) precisely because it went full ego stroking and started telling their target audience exactly what they wanted to hear.
While that is a laudable goal the reality is government owned utilities rarely view "cheapest amount possible" as a primary goal. Rather, they become tools for politicians to use to maintain themselves in office by providing jobs, subsidies , etc to please their voters and donors. That is not to say government owned utilities cannot provide lower cost services just that cost is often secondary to politics.
That is not my experience, mind pointing to examples? My experience with government owned utilities is exactly the opposite of what you claim. There are several local power companies owned by the city government, they are cheaper and better run than the corporate power utility that serves the rest of the area. After heavy storms they often have power restored in half the time of the private company. Did I mention the lower power rates? Government does a rats ass job of predicting demand and supply for widgets but they do a damn good job of predicting demand and allocating resources for major utilities like power companies because it's a pretty well fixed demand and is an essential service.
People always trot out the old refrain you did, but I see little experience that it's true. Rather than accept that what you hear repeated so often is true you should try to find evidence that is true because you will probably be surprised at how often it's wrong.
The problem is we always had a sort of informal treaty with the Russians that we wouldn't go after their space based assets and likewise they wouldn't either.
The problem is the Chinese have taken an aggressive approach to neutralizing US space assets in the event of conflict. The believe they could win a conflict with the US by eliminating the space advantage the US enjoys. In fact their strategy appears to believe that US battlefield superiority is tied almost exclusively to US space based assets. I think they will ultimately be surprised by how effective such a strategy would be and how much blowback they'd get from the world after they shoot down a bunch of GPS satellites.
Ultimately that's what this agreement with Japan is about, attempting to neutralize or degrade the ASAT (anti-satellite) capabilities of the Chinese. Japan is critically positioned to shoot down ASAT weapons fired from China.
It's not particularly race that decides this as much as national origin. American's or Europeans start dieing and real resources will be poured into the research. As long as it's an "African" disease no one really cares in the west enough to pour real resources into a vaccine.
A Africa could be a major world power because of it's resources, that is if every tribal group wasn't trying to kill every other tribal group and every religion wasn't trying to kill every other religion. There is one simple fact of life, money gets things done and when poor people are dieing and the rich aren't, the problem won't be solved because the poor people don't have the resources to solve it and the rich don't care.
Your wrong on this. If Ebola has gone airborne (it kills more than 2/3rd of infected and it's got a 21 day incubation) we could be in for the worst pandemic the world has seen since the black death in Europe. The typical response to that statement is an eyeroll and a "they've said that before". Yes they did, and then they did what they always do, massive massive research to understand the virus so they could develop a vaccine before it got to the kill everyone stage. The end goal of bringing these people home is a vaccine for the rest of us before Ebola comes here for real (and it will come here if it goes airborne). The secondary goal is to save their life. But if they die they have direct access to the live virus and a corpse killed by it. The research value is immeasurable for those two things.
Please understand without a threat of this coming to the west there is almost no chance whatsoever that a vaccine will be developed. West Nile Virus has been around for hundreds or thousands of years. It's arrival in the US triggered real research that is probably going to result in a vaccine next year. The same is true of Ebola, bringing an infected American home is going to result in fast tracking the research on this virus.
A pandemic like this is incredibly scary. In every major city in the US we have enough medical beds to support about 1/4 of 1% of the population being sick enough to require hospitalization. If 20% of the population needed medical attention about 19.75% probably wouldn't get any. There is a movie that I think accurately displays this. It's called Contagion, they show the CDC and FEMA building basically large warehouse facilities to hold the sick and dieing (with very little care) and they even show the massive central disposal systems that would need to be in place to handle that number of bodies. The other nice thing is they show the breakdown in society including uncontrolled rioting and all the bad stuff humans will do to survive.
I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of systems out there running on it because the application it runs is essential, runs perfectly fine and would cost billions to replace.
Sometimes it's not smart to replace something just because you can or it's outdated. If it serves it's purpose, the code is essentially error free because it's been in use so long and the systems work fine there is little need to replace them. I'd argue it's better at that point to keep the original software and build new ways to access it through external applications than it is to recreate the server application.
It is incredibly simple and relatively cheap given the costs the pollution imposes. China's mix of pollution sources is little different than the rest of the world.
Non point sources are about 40% of the emissions mix and composed mostly of vehicle emissions in the summer with some heating emissions from wood and coal in the winter. The cars they are buying for the most part have the same systems in them as they do in the US, the problem is the fuel used is incredibly dirty. This could be fixed in less than a year by requiring the same fuel standards as western countries use. The non-point winter emissions can be addressed through a combination of regulations on wood/coal burning appliances and providing better sources such as natural gas and electric heating.
The remaining 60% of emissions are all point source and can be addressed through regulation of smoke stack emissions. Almost everything seriously harmful can be scrubbed at the stack. Some emissions like nitric and sulfuric acids are harder to scrub but we have the technology today to remove the majority. The worst of the worst, PM 2.5 and other particulates are trivial to scrub, this technology has been around since the 70's. The Chinese government could mandate the installation of these systems and finance the retrofits, not only could it be done relatively quickly they could cause a massive boom in internal industries to handle this.
This isn't hard. The US, Europe and Japan have done this exact thing already. In the 60's the US had air as bad as China have now, it's what triggered our entire environmental movement, the laws and all the technology to clean it up. This is easy precisely because all the research on how to fix it has already been done and all the systems are already developed and tested. The Chinese would just need to copy the regulations and requirements the US/Europe/Japan put on their industry. It's just a matter of money, and they have plenty of money to fix this AND an authoritarian government to force it's implementation.
It's beyond silly to say this is hard. It couldn't be easier.
He's test running all the manufacturing technology for an entirely new product category. Tesla scares the bejesus out of the car companies because he could very well come in from the side and own the entire industry because he's already patented all the technology needed to actually build these cars. Why do you think every time there is an incident with a Tesla car it makes the national news? You don't honestly believe that's just a coincidence do you?
You can't engineer a massive toolchain change like this overnight, the electric car is a completely different animal and requires totally different assembly lines and engineering into how to build them the cheapest. The Model S is test running these assembly line issues, the Telsa Roadster was the demonstration platform. You don't build 25K cars a year as a novelty. To put this in perspective the worldwide sales for many of the luxury German cars are in the same number of cars sold (from 8K to about 30K is a typical high end luxury car).
Jail isn't going to do any good unless you put the whole agency in jail.
The solution is a massive budget cut and laws that make specific conduct not only illegal but automatically appoint special prosecutors to act on. Then you put into law and fund an agency who's entire job is to spy on the CIA and report every time they break the law. The biggest problem with the post 9/11 revisions was we gave all these people basically immunity to do whatever they want in the name of national security. It's obscene.
The trial phase of Microsoft was during the Clinton Administration. The Penalty phase took place during the Bush Admin and the US attorney was changed by the president. The new attorney threw out all the possible mitigation the previous US attorney had developed.
Why Microsoft was never effectively punished should be obvious.
It would be cheaper for everyone to just fix the pollution problem by putting heavy restrictions on emissions. Seriously, $1000 dollar air purifiers to remove the debris put in the air to save $0.05 on scrubbers is stupidity of the highest order. In a lot of cases the scrubbers are already on the factories because Chinese law requires them, just doesn't require that they be in operation. In about a year China could dramatically reduce this pollution to western world levels with simple installing or activating scrubbers on smoke stacks.
This continues to show China is a pay for play game, in that you are well connected enough in the communist party and laws and environmental rules just don't apply and it doesn't matter if it kills the little people.
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You aren't considering weather.
It rains a lot in Florida, Southern California on the other hand is a desert and it almost never rains. So even if Florida is slightly further south and gets a little bit more direct sunshine more of that sunshine likely reaches the ground in Southern California due to the lack of cloud cover.
Be careful with Buffalo, they have switched major components before with just a version number that sometimes didn't even appear on the box. There are versions of the same router that aren't supported by OpenWRT and DD-WRT because they swapped in a cheaper component that wasn't Linux compatible. People opened the box and found nasty surprises. I'd always wait a while after Buffalo releases a product then watch the reviews before you purchase to make sure they haven't pulled a WZR-HP-AG300NH again.
I say this as an owner of the router I quoted but I got lucky and got the right version but I was only a month away from being one of the people that got burned.
Suggesting an AP to someone looking for a router is a sure way to make someone very dissapointed.
I don't like calling it kinetic energy as that generally means linear motion for a particle, the particles are vibrating and that level of vibration is the temperature. The higher the vibration the more likely it is to react with surrounding particles through accidental collisions. Zero Kelvin is supposed to be the point where all the vibration stops and the particle is no longer vibrating.
Attack the source when the numbers don't say what you want them to say. Get real. I've seen numerous reports from all over the country from dozens of different groups that say solar can be installed without subsidy cheaper than current nuclear and within striking distance of even the cheapest natural gas.
A 10 year payback is about a 6% ROI. That's a phenominal rate of return. After 10 years you are guaranteed 15 years of free power. That's the panel warranty. The panels will last longer than that.
The same people making them today. Every company that made solar panels in the 1980's is still making solar panels.
Horseshit. How the solar is connected to the grid is entirely dependent on local codes, net metering rules and what equipment is installed. There is no requirement that your panels stop generating power, only that you can't feed power back into the grid. With an automatic transfer switch that disconnects you from the utility in the event of power failure you can still feed your own circuits.
Everything you've said is full of misinformation and outright deceptions. It's so blatant it's almost as if you are a paid sock puppet.
That's great that you believe it. Too bad your beliefs and reality are so different.
A few facts for you, installed solar PV per year is growing at 400% per year for the last 5 years. Costs are declining about 20% per year. You can currently go out right now and find a company in your town that will provide, install and maintain PV panels on your roof for a guaranteed electricity price that is LOWER than what you currently pay and is fixed for 10 years (the loan is a monthly payment that will be cheaper than the power cost it offsets over a year). At the end of the 10 years you own the panels outright and all the power generated until they fail is FREE. PV panels routinely come with a 25 year warranty that guarantees they will provide 80% of their rated power for 25 years. Most PV panels lose about 0.5% of power output per year with no known lifetime, they could in fact last 100 years for all we know.
Right now, without subsidy Solar PV is cheaper than nuclear power per KW/hr. If the price of panels continues to decline at the same rate it has for the last 5 years by 2020 Solar PV will be cheaper than Coal without subsidy. The absolute only thing holding back Solar PV from storming up and down our grid is the up and down nature of it's generation. Tack reasonably priced storage on and that goes out the window. As solar gains traction manufacturing capacity will ramp up and costs will continue to decline. There are a lot of very rich people betting on solar. Companies like Solar City are routinely turning down hundreds of millions of investor money because they simply can't hire enough people to install that many panels.
Low level employees don't know diddly. This type of accounting fraud is highly complex and not even accountants can spot it when reviewing the books, that's how insidious and dangerous it is. This is how Enron concealed their fraud, they created several hundred companies with no apparent ties to the parent company, they then booked fraudulent sales, put bogus debt numbers into accounts receivable and booked fake loans to the company.
It's impossible to unravel this stuff if you don't know these companies are actually owned by the company cooking the books because it appears to be a separate company to the accountants and it's status is deliberately concealed (registered with fake names in foreign jurisdictions). The tactics used are right out of a mafia playbook for concealing and laundering money. You have to be specially trained to spot this type of behavior and its telltale signs, it's what forensic accountants specialize in and even then it can take months of digging to unravel what's going on.
That's the problem, no one but the person in charge of the building the scam is 2 cents the wiser. Up until Enron crashed and burned, their accountants and all their employees (6000 people) had no idea what Ken Lay, Shilling and the complicit CFO had done. You say talk to low level employees I say look at the 6000 employees of Enron that had almost all their life savings in the stock and tell me how many had any idea the company was going under until the cash flow problems started.
We can't have accurate accounting where one party in the system is willing to basically commit fraud and cook the books. Accounting is as much an art as a science and it is incredibly easy to commit fraud and create fraudulent sets of books. The basis of the entire stock market is that these companies aren't trying to deliberately defraud people to increase their own pocketbooks. That's why we need to throw the book at people that do this and put them in deep dark holes and take every cent they have. The damage it could do our economy if this became even slightly common would be enormous.
If the keys are stored on the box in any way then they are compromised because the box is. The synology box is rooted, any information stored on that box is compromised. If for example your root key for S3 is backed up on the NAS then it's compromised.
People are glossing over this, if the box is rooted everything it knows and stores is compromised, that's how people need to be analyzing this instead of blowing it off as no big deal.
You do realize that for the S3 backup to work Synology or the NAS (and the NAS has you Synology login info) has your login information for S3, and that if this thing is owning the NAS there is a pretty damn good chance the malware has owned your S3 instance as well right? The only way it wouldn't is if the S3 backup is totally manual.
If your accounting is violating all the rules it's possible to hide the real accounting information from everyone. Look at what Enron did with layers of fake companies that weren't on the books holding all the bad debt. When you go to that level of fraud the only people that are going to be able to unravel it are forensic accountants and months of fine toothed combs. The system is gameable because it operates on a system of trust, when these CEO's and accountants are willing to go to the level of full on accounting fraud the system we have doesn't work because it always assumed we had rational players that aren't two bit scammers. The degrading of ethics in business school has apparently turned that on it ear.
Maybe the answer is for these accounting firms to hire real forensic accountants to analyze companies. But if we've reached that point it's even scarier than you can imagine. What I think we need to do is be putting these CEO's and CFO's in jail, for 15-30 years and assigning high enough criminal penalties and restitution to ensure they are broke when they get out. Sarbanes-Oxley gave them the teeth to make that happen, the problem is right now Crime pays. The justice department should be investigating everyone involved.
Are you kidding? The people that tie steel for a living are lifting more than 50lbs at a time for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. I'd bet better than 10% of our populations is constantly lifting and moving that kind of weight around pretty much continuously for their entire career.
What are you, a basement dwelling virgin who can barely lift 10lbs?
The only time 50 or even 100lbs should be a problem is if the shape is awkward (too long and wide, etc), the edges are sharp or the center of mass and shape make it awkward to hold (such as requiring that you hold the weight with your fingers rather than your arms). All but the sharp edges are usually neutralized by getting multiple people to move it. Now you start talking 100+ pounds in either dense or awkard shapes and this could be very helpful but 75lbs is nothing.
At the time the treaty was signed the US and Nato were the threat and the Russians were the solution to the threat. The US and Nato agreed to never invade and the Russians agreed to use their Nukes to guarantee that. The Russians alone violated their portion of the treaty. The US and Nato had no obligation under the treaty to defend Ukraine's borders, only to respect them which we have done by continuing to no recognize the seizure of Crimea.
The US isn't going to invade China, ever. That whole never get involved in a land war in Asia thing applies even if we didn't appear to know that before Afghanistan we certainly know it now.
Any war with China will be Naval and focused on the east China sea and the straight through the south china sea. The US navy is at least 20 years ahead of the Chinese PLA Naval forces. Any battle is going to be focused on the US Navy blockading Chinese shipping and starving their economy.
As far as the parents claim that China doesn't believe they could beat the US they are wrong. China has been running articles in the communist party rag about how they could keep America out of any battle through diplomatic and economic pressure. They seem to believe their 1.2 trillion in debt is leverage. They also believe that their anti-ship missiles could neutralize the US Navy in an actual shooting battle.
The drug is NOT ready. That's the whole point of this. They were given experimental "serum" which had not even reached Human trials (years away from them in fact, they had just recently reached simian trials after the mouse models which is essentially the very first step towards human trials). This stuff could have outright killed them. These two people subjected themselves to essentially untested experimentation in the hope of a miracle. They got lucky.
Had they tested this stuff on a bunch of Africans and they died can you imagine the bad press it would have generated? I can see the headlines now. "America tests drugs on poor Africans in unethical medical experimentation".
And you aren't willing to pay for it. You forgot to add that point. And that little point make a HUGE difference.
The whole point of journalism is that they cover everything then put it in sections and you read the sections you want. When you are no longer willing to pay for any of it and you restrict access to those that tailor it to your views you've just asked for infotainment and the ego stroking that comprises most "news" these days. Fox news is so successful (or was) precisely because it went full ego stroking and started telling their target audience exactly what they wanted to hear.
That is not my experience, mind pointing to examples? My experience with government owned utilities is exactly the opposite of what you claim. There are several local power companies owned by the city government, they are cheaper and better run than the corporate power utility that serves the rest of the area. After heavy storms they often have power restored in half the time of the private company. Did I mention the lower power rates? Government does a rats ass job of predicting demand and supply for widgets but they do a damn good job of predicting demand and allocating resources for major utilities like power companies because it's a pretty well fixed demand and is an essential service.
People always trot out the old refrain you did, but I see little experience that it's true. Rather than accept that what you hear repeated so often is true you should try to find evidence that is true because you will probably be surprised at how often it's wrong.
The problem is we always had a sort of informal treaty with the Russians that we wouldn't go after their space based assets and likewise they wouldn't either.
The problem is the Chinese have taken an aggressive approach to neutralizing US space assets in the event of conflict. The believe they could win a conflict with the US by eliminating the space advantage the US enjoys. In fact their strategy appears to believe that US battlefield superiority is tied almost exclusively to US space based assets. I think they will ultimately be surprised by how effective such a strategy would be and how much blowback they'd get from the world after they shoot down a bunch of GPS satellites.
Ultimately that's what this agreement with Japan is about, attempting to neutralize or degrade the ASAT (anti-satellite) capabilities of the Chinese. Japan is critically positioned to shoot down ASAT weapons fired from China.
It's not particularly race that decides this as much as national origin. American's or Europeans start dieing and real resources will be poured into the research. As long as it's an "African" disease no one really cares in the west enough to pour real resources into a vaccine.
A Africa could be a major world power because of it's resources, that is if every tribal group wasn't trying to kill every other tribal group and every religion wasn't trying to kill every other religion. There is one simple fact of life, money gets things done and when poor people are dieing and the rich aren't, the problem won't be solved because the poor people don't have the resources to solve it and the rich don't care.
Your wrong on this. If Ebola has gone airborne (it kills more than 2/3rd of infected and it's got a 21 day incubation) we could be in for the worst pandemic the world has seen since the black death in Europe. The typical response to that statement is an eyeroll and a "they've said that before". Yes they did, and then they did what they always do, massive massive research to understand the virus so they could develop a vaccine before it got to the kill everyone stage. The end goal of bringing these people home is a vaccine for the rest of us before Ebola comes here for real (and it will come here if it goes airborne). The secondary goal is to save their life. But if they die they have direct access to the live virus and a corpse killed by it. The research value is immeasurable for those two things.
Please understand without a threat of this coming to the west there is almost no chance whatsoever that a vaccine will be developed. West Nile Virus has been around for hundreds or thousands of years. It's arrival in the US triggered real research that is probably going to result in a vaccine next year. The same is true of Ebola, bringing an infected American home is going to result in fast tracking the research on this virus.
A pandemic like this is incredibly scary. In every major city in the US we have enough medical beds to support about 1/4 of 1% of the population being sick enough to require hospitalization. If 20% of the population needed medical attention about 19.75% probably wouldn't get any. There is a movie that I think accurately displays this. It's called Contagion, they show the CDC and FEMA building basically large warehouse facilities to hold the sick and dieing (with very little care) and they even show the massive central disposal systems that would need to be in place to handle that number of bodies. The other nice thing is they show the breakdown in society including uncontrolled rioting and all the bad stuff humans will do to survive.
I'm sure there are hundreds if not thousands of systems out there running on it because the application it runs is essential, runs perfectly fine and would cost billions to replace.
Sometimes it's not smart to replace something just because you can or it's outdated. If it serves it's purpose, the code is essentially error free because it's been in use so long and the systems work fine there is little need to replace them. I'd argue it's better at that point to keep the original software and build new ways to access it through external applications than it is to recreate the server application.
It is incredibly simple and relatively cheap given the costs the pollution imposes. China's mix of pollution sources is little different than the rest of the world.
Non point sources are about 40% of the emissions mix and composed mostly of vehicle emissions in the summer with some heating emissions from wood and coal in the winter. The cars they are buying for the most part have the same systems in them as they do in the US, the problem is the fuel used is incredibly dirty. This could be fixed in less than a year by requiring the same fuel standards as western countries use. The non-point winter emissions can be addressed through a combination of regulations on wood/coal burning appliances and providing better sources such as natural gas and electric heating.
The remaining 60% of emissions are all point source and can be addressed through regulation of smoke stack emissions. Almost everything seriously harmful can be scrubbed at the stack. Some emissions like nitric and sulfuric acids are harder to scrub but we have the technology today to remove the majority. The worst of the worst, PM 2.5 and other particulates are trivial to scrub, this technology has been around since the 70's. The Chinese government could mandate the installation of these systems and finance the retrofits, not only could it be done relatively quickly they could cause a massive boom in internal industries to handle this.
This isn't hard. The US, Europe and Japan have done this exact thing already. In the 60's the US had air as bad as China have now, it's what triggered our entire environmental movement, the laws and all the technology to clean it up. This is easy precisely because all the research on how to fix it has already been done and all the systems are already developed and tested. The Chinese would just need to copy the regulations and requirements the US/Europe/Japan put on their industry. It's just a matter of money, and they have plenty of money to fix this AND an authoritarian government to force it's implementation.
It's beyond silly to say this is hard. It couldn't be easier.
Not a serious product?
He's test running all the manufacturing technology for an entirely new product category. Tesla scares the bejesus out of the car companies because he could very well come in from the side and own the entire industry because he's already patented all the technology needed to actually build these cars. Why do you think every time there is an incident with a Tesla car it makes the national news? You don't honestly believe that's just a coincidence do you?
You can't engineer a massive toolchain change like this overnight, the electric car is a completely different animal and requires totally different assembly lines and engineering into how to build them the cheapest. The Model S is test running these assembly line issues, the Telsa Roadster was the demonstration platform. You don't build 25K cars a year as a novelty. To put this in perspective the worldwide sales for many of the luxury German cars are in the same number of cars sold (from 8K to about 30K is a typical high end luxury car).
Jail isn't going to do any good unless you put the whole agency in jail.
The solution is a massive budget cut and laws that make specific conduct not only illegal but automatically appoint special prosecutors to act on. Then you put into law and fund an agency who's entire job is to spy on the CIA and report every time they break the law. The biggest problem with the post 9/11 revisions was we gave all these people basically immunity to do whatever they want in the name of national security. It's obscene.
The trial phase of Microsoft was during the Clinton Administration. The Penalty phase took place during the Bush Admin and the US attorney was changed by the president. The new attorney threw out all the possible mitigation the previous US attorney had developed.
Why Microsoft was never effectively punished should be obvious.
It would be cheaper for everyone to just fix the pollution problem by putting heavy restrictions on emissions. Seriously, $1000 dollar air purifiers to remove the debris put in the air to save $0.05 on scrubbers is stupidity of the highest order. In a lot of cases the scrubbers are already on the factories because Chinese law requires them, just doesn't require that they be in operation. In about a year China could dramatically reduce this pollution to western world levels with simple installing or activating scrubbers on smoke stacks.
This continues to show China is a pay for play game, in that you are well connected enough in the communist party and laws and environmental rules just don't apply and it doesn't matter if it kills the little people.