This isn't the first time that California's silly gas laws have conspired to produce artificial shortages which spike prices at the pumps. California should standardize gasoline blends with the rest of the United States instead of throwing consumers under the bus, to the tune of billions of dollars per year wasted, in exchange for essentially meaningless and miniscule environmental benefits.
That's not what's causing the current problems here in California (an improving economy being one of the few "problems" that California doesn't have). No, the problem in California is the strict rules on what's called "summer blend" gasoline or CARBOB, which is required to be sold here well into autumn (another meddling innovation designed to tighten the thumbscrews on private vehicle owners whom the environmentalists here love to hate). There are few refineries that can produce this "California gas", which isn't required anywhere else, so any sort of refinery problems at the few that can, such as a fire or electrical problems or a shutdown pipeline, can all cause dramatic short term spikes in the price at the pump. This is exactly what's happening right now. There was a fire at the Chevron refinery, an Exxon refinery in the Los Angeles area was having power problems and a major north south pipeline was shuttered for repairs. All of this combined to create a perfect storm in the last month of required summer blend gasoline sales; one last summer gasp of sky high gasoline prices for California motorists already hard hit by the anemic economy, galloping food and housing cost inflation, and stubbornly high unemployment. As you can no doubt see, the California reputation for economic craziness, enforced by stupid government policies, is well deserved. This is a crises caused by bad regulation, not a shortage of oil or inability to bring it to market. If not for the meddling incompetence of the California state government and the Air Resources Board, who couldn't give two shits about average Californians taking it on the chin every time the fill up the tank, we wouldn't be in this mess.
The tsar bomba's energy output was over 50 terawatt hours (210 petajoules), which equals global electricity generation output for an entire day.
Did this bomb have moving parts? A cleverly assembled explosive device may or may qualify as a machine, depending upon one's definition of the word, but I doubt that this bomb contained any mechanical mechanisms as complex as the turbopumps on the rocket engines for example.
You're quite correct. I stand corrected sir. Still, who wouldn't have wanted a ticket to ride that train? It's a shame that spaceflight isn't "cool" like that anymore, it really was a hell of thing back in the day.
Yeah, the 7.65 million pounds of hydrogen powered peak thrust from the Saturn V rocket was truly something to see. It was like nothing else either before or since.
inability to comply with new-vehicle tracking mandates.
What's to prevent them, some years down the line if not immediately, from requiring that you retrofit your existing older car to have this device installed ala LoJack or satellite radio or any number of other devices that owners currently voluntarily install into their older vehicles?
In 8 years we'll have SSDs for less than 1/10th the price, and replacing them will be cheap.
Most people don't work on their own machines. I realize that we here on Slashdot are perfectly capable of replacing our harddrives and restoring a backup or image, but most consumers don't do that. They take their device somewhere to get it fixed where, like with cars, the cost is in the labor and inconvenience, not so much the parts. So whether or not the drive is 1/10 the price doesn't make much difference when the labor costs and inconvenience of having to take time out of your day to visit the repair location are taken into account. For many people, this makes a harddrive failure costly, and something to be avoided, no matter how cheap the drive is.
Really? Then why so many reports of SSD failures in such short time? If the chips are good, but the drive still fails do you really care as a consumer? That's like saying, "well sure your brakes failed and your car crashed, but it least it wasn't the fault of the wheels".
These NAND flash chips have a very limited number of writes compared to standard magnetic storage. Perhaps someone who has owned one of these laptops or one of the new SSD macbooks can comment, but from what I've heard the reliability these SSD chips stinks. What good is fast if your machine is a brick in a few years or less and all for a premium price?
This is disastrous! We ought to have an investigation into the cause of this 'hog gap' without further delay. Moreover, we must immediately inaugurate funding for a Strategic Bacon Reserve to be drawn down during times of national need, like every morning around breakfast time.
The Iranians I've met buck the trend with Islam in general -- they seem to be cultured and enlightened people who have a lot of respect for education.
No doubt you've also noticed that these people mostly tend to live in exile outside of Iran, either as private businessmen or as academics in American and European universities. The intelligent and cultured people with the means to do so mostly fled the country after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and many of them haven't been back since. So the people that you meet are mostly not the ones who can effect any sort of real change in their former homeland. They're nice people, but any change isn't going to start with them as long as they remain in exile and they know that they will be killed or thrown in prison and tortured if they return so very few of them are willing to go back for any reason, least of all to lead a counter-revolution.
What I said was any justification is almost guaranteed to be something that most people would find unacceptable.
And you're free to NOT use Facebook, as I and many others have chosen to do. If you still want to use Facebook, it's Zuckerberg's way or the highway. That much at least he's made abundantly clear.
Believe it or not, it's possible to both send your kids to private school and to also want to fix what's wrong with public schools.
If he doesn't believe in the change, why should we? He who calls upon the rest of us to change should be leading the way, don't you agree? Speaking out in favor of public education while at the same time sending your own children to private school is the textbook definition of Limousine Liberalism.
But leave it to a partisan idiot to ignore almost all of the points of a well-written, cogent post and instead respond with a bitchy whine about the hypocrisy of liberals.
If we're going to judge our leaders by what they do, instead of merely by what they say, then this isn't stupid and it absolutely matters. Evidence of hypocrisy speaks to a candidates personal character and integrity or lack thereof. If a candidate is hypocritical on smaller issues then how can we trust them on larger ones?
Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
Which is precisely what makes them desirable. Parents send their children to these schools because doing so gives them an advantage. Raising your own kids is difficult enough with having to deal with the mistakes of other parents and their problem children. Even President Obama sends his daughters to private school. Of course, he wants to you to send your own children to public school. Like so many other liberals it's, "do as I say, not as I do."
Tell that to those killed in the crusades.. or by the inquisition, or dead because of a thousand other dumb fucking reasons.
As others have said, that was six centuries ago. At some point people need to move on from the past. The Christians have long since moved on whereas the Muslims seem to remain stuck in the 7th century. It's popular here on Slashdot to say that the radical Christians, for example, are the same as or just as bad as Al-Qaeda but does anyone honestly believe that? I cannot recall a single instance where somebody was killed over an unflattering cartoon or even just a cartoon of Jesus. Look at the Muslim reaction to the Dutch Cartoon affair and now this. It's madness. If my choice is between these people or Ned Flanders, I'll take "Hidlee Ho Neighbor" any day.
Basically Amazon has a lot of long speculative interest based upon the possible future value of their EC2 compute cloud, tablet business and other SAAS offerings which remain largely unrealized as of today. Essentially, there's a lot of betting on high future revenue growth in those areas of Amazon's business while the current earnings, which come mostly from retail operations, are still relatively modest by way of comparison. They're good, but not enough by themselves to justify the high price; hence the high P/E ratio. All of the current and likely future revenue, at least for the near term, seems to be priced in right now PLUS a hefty premium. In a word, owning Amazon stock is relatively expensive; especially if their tech investments don't pay out big time in the medium to longer term. Incidentally, I don't own Apple for many of the same reasons; very high future growth projections and betting on future prospects with little or no compensation for downside risk. When everyone "has to own" a particular stock, like Apple or Amazon or Google, that's often a fairly reliable signal that the stock is over-hyped and overbought. Even if the underlying business is good, it's still very easy to pay too much for a share.
If you're a small investor reading this and you still want to trade expensive and risky stocks like Amazon or Apple, it would be best to do it using a collar with options. Your upside may be limited, but so is your downside and with a share price that high even a few percentage points move in the wrong direction can mean a big loss for the small investor; you can get squashed. Even with protection, it's still risky to trade these stocks because the likelihood that an individual knows something that the analysts and insiders don't or haven't already traded on is miniscule. You'd have to take larger risks on upside or downside surprises to make any money and IMHO, and that's just not worth it. The same limited profit can be had more easily and for less risk in other investments.
Whenever I'm signing up for a new site or using a service for the first time, I always do a recon of their sign up procedures using a fake name / email address so I can see what sort of information they "require" before I even get started and even then I only give up what I absolutely have to. If I can get away with using the fake information permanently, then I do that. I keep track of all my fake identities in an encrypted file container by site name so that I can be consistent with my aliases. This strategy works well for me and I'm sure that I can't be the only person out there who does this. As Robert De Niro's character, Jack Byrnes, said in Meet the Fokkers (paraphrased), "If you're outside the circle of trust, you're on a need to know basis and right now you don't need to know."
You do realize that most people would consider that to be an absolutely crazy PE to buy at, right? For historical comparison, the S&P 500 P/E was 45 just before the dotcom bust in 2000. The Japanese stock market reached a peak P/E of 68 in 1989 at the end of a 15 year long bull market before the crash and property value deflation of the 1990s gave Japan their "lost decade". The US housing bubble exceeded P/Es of 50 (the price of the home vs the income that it could generate as a rental) at its height in 2007. Always remember that there's no profit in paying for past growth when buying a stock. In investing, what matters is the future, not the past.
Even so, the fee was presumably much less than the price of a taxi cab medallion in say New York City, which others have quoted as going for up to $1 million when offered at auction. Also, before discontinuing the exam, where there any limits on how many people could sit for the exam other than the number willing to show up and pay the fee to take it?
You're talking about what's basically a luxury service
You could make that argument about some black limo services, but somehow I doubt that riding around in the average New York yellow cab is a "luxury service". Have you seen the inside of a typical New York cab? if that's luxury then I'm afraid to ask what qualifies as ordinary.
A person wanting to take a taxi in Russia can simply position themselves on the edge of the road and beckon to the traffic. At some point someone will pull over - either a professional taxi driver or someone just accepting the occasional fare.
A friend of mine did this while studying abroad in Russia sometimes when he needed to get around. That was nearly two decades ago now, but back then at least there were plenty of drivers willing to pick you up and take you to a destination within Moscow, especially one that was on the way for the driver, for a handful of rubles.
Libertarian types can be such dumbasses sometimes,
You do understand that a powerful government still doesn't get you what you want right? The corporations and business owners are more than capable of capturing and controlling the powerful government to serve their needs ahead of and even to the detriment of yours. This is even worse than having powerful corporations without a correspondingly powerful central government because at least in that instance competition has a chance of breaking up bad businesses. The regulated taxi cab monopoly, secured by the medallion system, is a perfect example of corrupt interests capturing and using the power of government to prevent any sort of competition from being effective against them, no matter how bad their practices are. It's naive to expect that complaining to city hall will have any affect on these entrenched interests, backed by government power. So you see, the only viable long term solution that has a chance of working is a smaller and more limited government which cannot or rather does not interfere in the natural competitive selection process in the marketplace. Nothing is guaranteed, except that nothing will ever change as long as governments allow regulated monopolies in place of real competition.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it finally caught up with us.
This isn't the first time that California's silly gas laws have conspired to produce artificial shortages which spike prices at the pumps. California should standardize gasoline blends with the rest of the United States instead of throwing consumers under the bus, to the tune of billions of dollars per year wasted, in exchange for essentially meaningless and miniscule environmental benefits.
Oil is a much more valuable commodity.
Sssh! Don't tell them that, let them all pile into gold instead. More oil and oil stocks available at better prices for the rest of us.
An improving economy demands more gasoline.
That's not what's causing the current problems here in California (an improving economy being one of the few "problems" that California doesn't have). No, the problem in California is the strict rules on what's called "summer blend" gasoline or CARBOB, which is required to be sold here well into autumn (another meddling innovation designed to tighten the thumbscrews on private vehicle owners whom the environmentalists here love to hate). There are few refineries that can produce this "California gas", which isn't required anywhere else, so any sort of refinery problems at the few that can, such as a fire or electrical problems or a shutdown pipeline, can all cause dramatic short term spikes in the price at the pump. This is exactly what's happening right now. There was a fire at the Chevron refinery, an Exxon refinery in the Los Angeles area was having power problems and a major north south pipeline was shuttered for repairs. All of this combined to create a perfect storm in the last month of required summer blend gasoline sales; one last summer gasp of sky high gasoline prices for California motorists already hard hit by the anemic economy, galloping food and housing cost inflation, and stubbornly high unemployment. As you can no doubt see, the California reputation for economic craziness, enforced by stupid government policies, is well deserved. This is a crises caused by bad regulation, not a shortage of oil or inability to bring it to market. If not for the meddling incompetence of the California state government and the Air Resources Board, who couldn't give two shits about average Californians taking it on the chin every time the fill up the tank, we wouldn't be in this mess.
The tsar bomba's energy output was over 50 terawatt hours (210 petajoules), which equals global electricity generation output for an entire day.
Did this bomb have moving parts? A cleverly assembled explosive device may or may qualify as a machine, depending upon one's definition of the word, but I doubt that this bomb contained any mechanical mechanisms as complex as the turbopumps on the rocket engines for example.
You're quite correct. I stand corrected sir. Still, who wouldn't have wanted a ticket to ride that train? It's a shame that spaceflight isn't "cool" like that anymore, it really was a hell of thing back in the day.
It doesn't have the punch of hydrogen
Yeah, the 7.65 million pounds of hydrogen powered peak thrust from the Saturn V rocket was truly something to see. It was like nothing else either before or since.
inability to comply with new-vehicle tracking mandates.
What's to prevent them, some years down the line if not immediately, from requiring that you retrofit your existing older car to have this device installed ala LoJack or satellite radio or any number of other devices that owners currently voluntarily install into their older vehicles?
Marches on steady. Unstoppable and with an insatiable appetite for new technology
One might even go so far as to say that we've seen this movie [Brazil (1985)] before.
In 8 years we'll have SSDs for less than 1/10th the price, and replacing them will be cheap.
Most people don't work on their own machines. I realize that we here on Slashdot are perfectly capable of replacing our harddrives and restoring a backup or image, but most consumers don't do that. They take their device somewhere to get it fixed where, like with cars, the cost is in the labor and inconvenience, not so much the parts. So whether or not the drive is 1/10 the price doesn't make much difference when the labor costs and inconvenience of having to take time out of your day to visit the repair location are taken into account. For many people, this makes a harddrive failure costly, and something to be avoided, no matter how cheap the drive is.
SSDs are plenty reliable.
Really? Then why so many reports of SSD failures in such short time? If the chips are good, but the drive still fails do you really care as a consumer? That's like saying, "well sure your brakes failed and your car crashed, but it least it wasn't the fault of the wheels".
These NAND flash chips have a very limited number of writes compared to standard magnetic storage. Perhaps someone who has owned one of these laptops or one of the new SSD macbooks can comment, but from what I've heard the reliability these SSD chips stinks. What good is fast if your machine is a brick in a few years or less and all for a premium price?
This is disastrous! We ought to have an investigation into the cause of this 'hog gap' without further delay. Moreover, we must immediately inaugurate funding for a Strategic Bacon Reserve to be drawn down during times of national need, like every morning around breakfast time.
The Iranians I've met buck the trend with Islam in general -- they seem to be cultured and enlightened people who have a lot of respect for education.
No doubt you've also noticed that these people mostly tend to live in exile outside of Iran, either as private businessmen or as academics in American and European universities. The intelligent and cultured people with the means to do so mostly fled the country after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and many of them haven't been back since. So the people that you meet are mostly not the ones who can effect any sort of real change in their former homeland. They're nice people, but any change isn't going to start with them as long as they remain in exile and they know that they will be killed or thrown in prison and tortured if they return so very few of them are willing to go back for any reason, least of all to lead a counter-revolution.
What I said was any justification is almost guaranteed to be something that most people would find unacceptable.
And you're free to NOT use Facebook, as I and many others have chosen to do. If you still want to use Facebook, it's Zuckerberg's way or the highway. That much at least he's made abundantly clear.
I don't believe the DNA examiner said there was his DNA on the bloody glove
Or better yet, tell them that you believe that the DNA on the bloody glove was "contaminated" and that, "if the glove don't fit, you must acquit".
Believe it or not, it's possible to both send your kids to private school and to also want to fix what's wrong with public schools.
If he doesn't believe in the change, why should we? He who calls upon the rest of us to change should be leading the way, don't you agree? Speaking out in favor of public education while at the same time sending your own children to private school is the textbook definition of Limousine Liberalism.
But leave it to a partisan idiot to ignore almost all of the points of a well-written, cogent post and instead respond with a bitchy whine about the hypocrisy of liberals.
If we're going to judge our leaders by what they do, instead of merely by what they say, then this isn't stupid and it absolutely matters. Evidence of hypocrisy speaks to a candidates personal character and integrity or lack thereof. If a candidate is hypocritical on smaller issues then how can we trust them on larger ones?
Every single private school I have ever seen routinely expludes all or most of those popluations.
Which is precisely what makes them desirable. Parents send their children to these schools because doing so gives them an advantage. Raising your own kids is difficult enough with having to deal with the mistakes of other parents and their problem children. Even President Obama sends his daughters to private school. Of course, he wants to you to send your own children to public school. Like so many other liberals it's, "do as I say, not as I do."
Tell that to those killed in the crusades.. or by the inquisition, or dead because of a thousand other dumb fucking reasons.
As others have said, that was six centuries ago. At some point people need to move on from the past. The Christians have long since moved on whereas the Muslims seem to remain stuck in the 7th century. It's popular here on Slashdot to say that the radical Christians, for example, are the same as or just as bad as Al-Qaeda but does anyone honestly believe that? I cannot recall a single instance where somebody was killed over an unflattering cartoon or even just a cartoon of Jesus. Look at the Muslim reaction to the Dutch Cartoon affair and now this. It's madness. If my choice is between these people or Ned Flanders, I'll take "Hidlee Ho Neighbor" any day.
I don't see where the growth is coming from there.
The following two articles seem to capture the general analyst and investor opinions on the matter:
Skeptical Of Amazon At These Levels
Why is Amazon's price-to-earnings ratio so high?
Basically Amazon has a lot of long speculative interest based upon the possible future value of their EC2 compute cloud, tablet business and other SAAS offerings which remain largely unrealized as of today. Essentially, there's a lot of betting on high future revenue growth in those areas of Amazon's business while the current earnings, which come mostly from retail operations, are still relatively modest by way of comparison. They're good, but not enough by themselves to justify the high price; hence the high P/E ratio. All of the current and likely future revenue, at least for the near term, seems to be priced in right now PLUS a hefty premium. In a word, owning Amazon stock is relatively expensive ; especially if their tech investments don't pay out big time in the medium to longer term. Incidentally, I don't own Apple for many of the same reasons; very high future growth projections and betting on future prospects with little or no compensation for downside risk. When everyone "has to own" a particular stock, like Apple or Amazon or Google, that's often a fairly reliable signal that the stock is over-hyped and overbought. Even if the underlying business is good, it's still very easy to pay too much for a share.
If you're a small investor reading this and you still want to trade expensive and risky stocks like Amazon or Apple, it would be best to do it using a collar with options. Your upside may be limited, but so is your downside and with a share price that high even a few percentage points move in the wrong direction can mean a big loss for the small investor; you can get squashed. Even with protection, it's still risky to trade these stocks because the likelihood that an individual knows something that the analysts and insiders don't or haven't already traded on is miniscule. You'd have to take larger risks on upside or downside surprises to make any money and IMHO, and that's just not worth it. The same limited profit can be had more easily and for less risk in other investments.
Whenever I'm signing up for a new site or using a service for the first time, I always do a recon of their sign up procedures using a fake name / email address so I can see what sort of information they "require" before I even get started and even then I only give up what I absolutely have to. If I can get away with using the fake information permanently, then I do that. I keep track of all my fake identities in an encrypted file container by site name so that I can be consistent with my aliases. This strategy works well for me and I'm sure that I can't be the only person out there who does this. As Robert De Niro's character, Jack Byrnes, said in Meet the Fokkers (paraphrased), "If you're outside the circle of trust, you're on a need to know basis and right now you don't need to know."
A PE of 100 is fine if there's room for growth
You do realize that most people would consider that to be an absolutely crazy PE to buy at, right? For historical comparison, the S&P 500 P/E was 45 just before the dotcom bust in 2000. The Japanese stock market reached a peak P/E of 68 in 1989 at the end of a 15 year long bull market before the crash and property value deflation of the 1990s gave Japan their "lost decade". The US housing bubble exceeded P/Es of 50 (the price of the home vs the income that it could generate as a rental) at its height in 2007. Always remember that there's no profit in paying for past growth when buying a stock. In investing, what matters is the future, not the past.
Even so, the fee was presumably much less than the price of a taxi cab medallion in say New York City, which others have quoted as going for up to $1 million when offered at auction. Also, before discontinuing the exam, where there any limits on how many people could sit for the exam other than the number willing to show up and pay the fee to take it?
You're talking about what's basically a luxury service
You could make that argument about some black limo services, but somehow I doubt that riding around in the average New York yellow cab is a "luxury service". Have you seen the inside of a typical New York cab? if that's luxury then I'm afraid to ask what qualifies as ordinary.
A person wanting to take a taxi in Russia can simply position themselves on the edge of the road and beckon to the traffic. At some point someone will pull over - either a professional taxi driver or someone just accepting the occasional fare.
A friend of mine did this while studying abroad in Russia sometimes when he needed to get around. That was nearly two decades ago now, but back then at least there were plenty of drivers willing to pick you up and take you to a destination within Moscow, especially one that was on the way for the driver, for a handful of rubles.
Libertarian types can be such dumbasses sometimes,
You do understand that a powerful government still doesn't get you what you want right? The corporations and business owners are more than capable of capturing and controlling the powerful government to serve their needs ahead of and even to the detriment of yours. This is even worse than having powerful corporations without a correspondingly powerful central government because at least in that instance competition has a chance of breaking up bad businesses. The regulated taxi cab monopoly, secured by the medallion system, is a perfect example of corrupt interests capturing and using the power of government to prevent any sort of competition from being effective against them, no matter how bad their practices are. It's naive to expect that complaining to city hall will have any affect on these entrenched interests, backed by government power. So you see, the only viable long term solution that has a chance of working is a smaller and more limited government which cannot or rather does not interfere in the natural competitive selection process in the marketplace. Nothing is guaranteed, except that nothing will ever change as long as governments allow regulated monopolies in place of real competition.