Maybe that's a fair immediate assumption, but did you view the video and, if so, did it cause you to reevaluate your initial assessment?
I started by assuming that the technology was still its infancy and hence crap[1], then I saw the video and realize that no only is the technology crap, but it's literally a person jumping out from a shadow at the last possible moment on a large thoroughfare nowhere near a crosswalk.
[1] Not even a judgment on Uber TBQH, could have been Tesla or GM or Toyota. I've seen enough technologies come up to realize that the cutting edge is riddled with snakes. By the time it's thoroughly ironed out, it's also super boring.
I did view the video.
And like most people I came to the conclusion that Uber was either using ridiculously bad cameras or the video was altered. This impression was only compounded when 3rd party videos came out that showed the road in question was actually quite well lit.
Either way Uber was still fully to blame for the collision, the tech was obviously not ready for testing on live roads, especially not with a single driver who was prone to being distracted. Authorizing that test is damn well close to negligent homicide.
You're starting from a faulty assumption yourself. That a driver that is inattentive with autopilot, regardless of whether it's more likely or not, would be a safe driver otherwise.
What? I never said nor implied that. All I'm saying is that the auto-pilot leads a driver to be less attentive. I never said that the auto-pilot was necessarily less safe, in face, I explicitly said: Now, just because the human with the autopilot is less attentive and able to respond to emergencies doesn't necessarily mean they have more accidents. The autopilot could be good enough even with the inattentive human it's still safer, but that's far from an obvious conclusion.
I'm just baffled by your resistance to acknowledging the obvious fact that a non-trivial portion of the drivers are less attentive with the auto-pilot enabled, and this potentially makes the auto-pilot less safe.
You would think wrong. You made a statement. One that is only related to mine in regards to automobiles and accidents. You don't make any point with it at all, you just made the statement. Further, I say that drivers should be attentive. That is a fact regardless of what features the vehicle has. An inattentive driver with autopilot is safer than an inattentive driver without autopilot.
You keep dodging the point I'm making.
A driver is more likely to be inattentive with an autopilot.
And that was the point of my statement, that saying the driver is supposed to be attentive is as useless as saying the driver is supposed to not crash. In both cases human error is a prerequisite of a crash, the question is how circumstances change the likelihood of those errors.
"In December, the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy issued a statement warning patients about unregulated gene therapies, saying such procedures are potentially dangerous and unlikely to provide any benefit."
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
More like building your own car or parachute. This isn't "non-expert does something that experts do routinely" it's "non-expert attempts something that experts are still trying to figure out how to do safely".
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments. As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments. DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.
Are you trying to counter my point with a somewhat related, but contextually irrelevant statement? I said people should be actively involved in the driving process, and you said they should also avoid having accidents. I can only assume you mean people don't avoid having accidents, and so they will not be an active participant in the driving process with autopilot. However, most drivers do in fact avoid having accidents most of the time. I would also venture that most people that use autopilot are also competent drivers.
I think it's a very relevant statement.
Your argument relies on the assumption that people will be just as attentive while supervising the auto-pilot as they are while performing unassisted driving, but that's a false assumption.
Asking someone to pay attention while the auto-pilot is driving is a very difficult task, a far more difficult task than driving. If the auto-pilot makes a mistake there is a strong possibility the human will not be paying close enough attention to catch it. Telling them they're supposed to be paying attention is no more a solution than telling them they're not supposed to have traffic accidents. Humans are fallible, it's just a question of how fallible they are at a particular task.
This isn't something that really applies to cruise control or bake assist. Cruise control removes some attention from speed control, but you're arguably more engaged in steering, it's possible you end up safer. As for brake assist... do you mean collision avoidance? Either way it's only a fallback system so it's not going to divert any attention from driving.
Now, just because the human with the autopilot is less attentive and able to respond to emergencies doesn't necessarily mean they have more accidents. The autopilot could be good enough even with the inattentive human it's still safer, but that's far from an obvious conclusion.
so if I'm a self driving car with no backup operator, do I prioritize the safety of my passengers? if I have to run down 5 people to keep my rider safe, do I do that? what if I have to do the whole run over your mother / a baby / a nun or run over a bunch of assholes? how are they ever going to solve for this, because whatever it chooses will be wrong
I don't think it counts. I think it's a simple set of tradeoffs, health > property, life > health, occupants > bystanders.
Ie, if given a choice between damaging the car or hurting a bystander it will damage the car.
If given the choice between smoking a pedestrian or a dangerous swerve into the ditch it chooses the ditch.
But if a pedestrian materializes in the middle of a bridge with no guardrails, well goodbye pedestrian.
Of course, that's a choice 1 or 2 generations down the line, right now it's a challenge just to keep them from killing people for no reason whatsoever.
As eluded to in the article you linked, the problem for Sebelius was using tax payer money, under 7324. That's why she paid the money back from political funds.
The article I saw didn't state the provision she was accused under, and the special council wasn't satisfied with her attempts at rectification.
7323(a) is limited by 7323(c), and the First Amendment. Appointed policy makers (which are political positions by nature) can, like everyone else, state their political opinions. 7323(c) states that clearly, in case there was any confusion. 7323(a) says they can't use their OFFICIAL AUTHORITY to affect an election, such as by ordering government resources, employees or money, be used to advance a political campaign. It does NOT say they can't state their opinions. Subsection (c) makes it very clear they can state their opinions.
That's if it wasn't obvious - politics is arguing about policy (politics and policy are from the same root word), so obviously policy makers are going to talk about politics - that's their job.
All this talk of exact wording and you're leaving off half a clause?
(1) use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election;
Now I don't know if appearing as an FCC commissioner counts more as "authority" or "influence", but he was appearing at CPAC as an FCC commissioner advocating for a specific political candidate.
The idea of the Hatch act is to draw a line between political campaigns and the operation of the federal government. A government official, endorsing candidates in their official capacity, crosses that line. It's exactly one of the kinds of activity the Hatch act was meant to stop.
If you want to know what the Hatch Act says, the Act itself is probably shorter than that Comey article. You can see for yourself exactly what it says, with no worry that the reporter is spinning it.
Are you a lawyer who specializes in this area of law? Because I'm not.
A good honest reporter will actually talk to experts who know what they're talking about and include that information in that article. We're trying to parse a weirdly formatted document making constant assumptions about the meaning of terms and phrases that might be completely unjustified.
Perhaps the most interesting bit is 7324 subsection (B). It says that people who are always on duty, because they are appointed officials rather than 9-5 employees, still have their first amendment rights. They can voice their political opinions just like everyone else, and the "not while on duty" rule doesn't apply to them since they are on duty 24/7.
I think that's part of what you're getting wrong.
It's not saying they're on duty 24/7, it's saying their position continues outside of normal work hours so at any moment you can be on duty. For instance, if you're appearing at CPAC as an FCC commissioner you're on duty, however, if you're at a BBQ chatting with friends you're not on duty. Unless one of those friends happens to be a CEO of a telecom bugging you about a policy and they you might be on duty again. It means your on-duty status is determined by the role you're playing in the moment, not by whether you're in the office during regular working hours.
But the office of special council's letter didn't actually talk about 7324, it talked about 7323(a)(1), using his position to interfere in an election. O'Reilly was appearing at CPAC in his capacity as an FCC commissioner when he advocated for a specific candidate in an election.
I suspect everyone breaks one law or another every day and doesn't know it.
Sure... but this is also a law he really shouldn't have broken.
His job is to help administer the FCC, not be a partisan hack speaking at CPAC and pumping Trump's candidacy.
Normal ethical people understand their roles come with a responsibility beyond partisanship and tend to avoid repeatedly violating laws meant to ensure ethical behaviour.
As near as I can tell only the POTUS and VP are completely exempt from the law. The provisions you pointed out don't mean that positions subject to Senate confirmation are exempt from the entire act, just portions of it.
Here I don't think the problem was that he was an FCC commissioner appearing at CPAC (though I think that breaks the spirit of the law). But that speaking as an FCC commissioner he advocated for Trump's candidacy.
If he had been appearing at CPAC just as himself he'd probably be fine.
Some school districts in CA are pushing $40K in expenses per student, with the high being New Jerusalem Elementary School District coming in at $119,000 per student. Even it it was an average of $13K (which is about the average for California), the average class size is around 22, meaning close to $300K per classroom. A bit of math will show that teacher salary is around 20% of all student spending. That's the issue - so much money is going to things beyond education.
has a projected budget that averages out to about $37,400 per student.
I know there are considerations like property upkeep, and administration, but holy moly, why not just bus them to a nearby community college at that rate?
I'm not sure where you live, but your numbers seem to be wildly off.
In my country its up to the parents to buy textbooks and materials for their children. Why isn't it like that in the USA? Or do only rich White or Asian parents do that, not the poor or Black or Hispanic parents?
Buy their own binders, papers, and pencils sure. But textbooks?
I'm not sure what country you live in but that seems like a bizarrely inefficient system. Every student needs the same textbooks and they don't serve the student after the end of the school year. Forcing the parents to buy them just creates a big inefficient resale market where there's no need for one.
Making the parents buy the textbooks is effectively just a poorly administered tax on parents.
Reality is, the reef goes through ups and downs. You can't control the whole reef like a theme park, there will always be dead zones and regenerating zones. It's way to big to control.
Yeah, life finds a way, species and ecosystems find ways to adapt to whatever we throw at them.
1) Is contra-indicated by his behavior up until this year. Reportedly in some ways he was even more ruthless than his father. His rhetoric was even more aggressive.
2) More likely this, specifically the aftermath of the nuclear test site collapse seemed to be a key turning point. Not only would this have likely set back their program, perhaps beyond recovery, it also demonstrated how much damage their messing around could do to the geology, right on China's border.After that point, everything toned downed rapidly. A few weeks ago he suddenly was willing to meet.
Then a couple of weeks ago, presumable at China's insistance, Kim Jong Un went to Beijing. We are note privy to what happened in that meeting, but afterward, NK was much more concrete about terms to wind things down, though the general overtures were promising prior to that.
Trump's rhetoric *probably* wasn't it, perhaps the elevated sanctions contributed, but I suspect if not for the test site incident, they'd still be betting on threat of force by nukes to keep things going until they'd control South Korea on their terms. Now it seems they've decided to appease the international community in exchange for guarantees their internal affairs would be left alone (which the rest of the world has already seemed content to leave alone, regardless of severity of atrocity).
3) NK has what they always wanted, Nukes and long range missiles. They don't really need to perform more tests of any kind since they do have credible deterrence against an attack. So now they enter the part of the game where they start playing nice and see what they can get.
But don't expect the Nukes or Missiles to actually go anywhere, Kim Jong Un knows they might be the only reason he made it out of this last showdown without getting attacked.
Nah, it probably has more to do with the fact that they have Nukes and long range missiles.
I wonder how they plan to credibly enforce the Denuclearization. It's relatively easy to monitor the development of Nukes, you need nuclear plants to get the plutonium and testing ranges to debug the tech. But once a country has working Nukes I don't know how you verify that they've been surrendered.
Just look at all the goodwill! With surprising speed and warmth, the presidents of North and South Korea reached a broad agreement on Wednesday to work for peace and unity on their bitterly divided peninsula, the biggest step by either side to ease tensions in 50 years. The agreement, which came after more than three hours of talks in the North Korea capital, Pyongyang, on the second day of their first summit meeting, was signed and toasted by President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and President Kim Jong Il of the North, who were shown on South Korean television clinking champagne glasses, shaking hands vigorously and smiling broadly. [...] The general points agreed on included the need for reconciliation and unification; the establishment of peace; the commencement in August of exchange visits by members of divided families; and more cultural exchanges.
Wait a minute... Kim Jong... Il?
Oooooh, that article is talking about the peace breakthrough from 2000. My bad, just got the wrong link!
These companies are carving up the internet (Comcast is "bundling Netflix", oh, and if you don't pay the higher Comcast rate, your traffic 'flix gets punished aka: deprioritized) and monetizing user data just EXACTLY as the NN supporters claimed would happen. The result is massive profits... which drive stock prices, higher consumer costs, and poorer user experience...
Trump has no leverage?? He played his cards perfectly here - even looking at his "worst" tweets, he was basically calling Kim's bluff. This was literally a country that can't even provide electricity for it's citizens trying to act tough against the world's largest military power. He got China to back off from NK's support by trying to provoke the US. Only NK is that stupid, and perhaps Russia as well but they actually have some power to back up their words.
And most (Chinese) companies violating the sanctions quickly realize the US is a far, far, far more valuable trading partner than NK ever will be if they were called out on their actions.
It finally took someone to play hardball to solve the problem. Same thing will happen with Palestine.
I was actually talking about Iran when it came to Trump having no leverage.
He does have leverage when it comes to NK, but it's more limited than you imply. The sanctions are only effective as their enforcement, and China has a lot of latitude in how strictly they enforce them and to the extent they turn a blind eye to smuggling. And the companies who trade in NK are regional, so they don't care about US markets.
Plus sanctions only hurt the citizens, not the leaders, and Kim isn't that concerned about his citizens. He'd prefer them to be better fed, and there's always the worry that too much starvation leads to revolution, but sanctions are really for show.
Obama couldn't stop Kim and neither could Trump, that's why Kim now has long range Nukes and is willing to talk.
So far, Kim is the only one who's actually gotten what he wants out of this whole thing.
Some hardware gets cheaper some of the time. I've noticed for instance that the old-fashioned mechanical watches that were the staple of the last century have not gotten any cheaper at all.
The cheap old-fashioned mechanical watches of the last century vanished from the market, replaced by cheap digital watches, smartphones, and fitbits.
The mechanical watches available now are more jewellery than watch.
Recently the price of high-end GPUs has skyrocketed.
That's mostly a supply shortage caused by cryptocurrency miners. Though I'm curious what will happen if mining stays profitable longterm.
Mass production of some goods can cause them to become cheaper but this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
There are exceptions, but I see no reason that car sensors would get more expensive when self-driving cars become mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that's a fair immediate assumption, but did you view the video and, if so, did it cause you to reevaluate your initial assessment?
I started by assuming that the technology was still its infancy and hence crap[1], then I saw the video and realize that no only is the technology crap, but it's literally a person jumping out from a shadow at the last possible moment on a large thoroughfare nowhere near a crosswalk.
[1] Not even a judgment on Uber TBQH, could have been Tesla or GM or Toyota. I've seen enough technologies come up to realize that the cutting edge is riddled with snakes. By the time it's thoroughly ironed out, it's also super boring.
I did view the video.
And like most people I came to the conclusion that Uber was either using ridiculously bad cameras or the video was altered. This impression was only compounded when 3rd party videos came out that showed the road in question was actually quite well lit.
Either way Uber was still fully to blame for the collision, the tech was obviously not ready for testing on live roads, especially not with a single driver who was prone to being distracted. Authorizing that test is damn well close to negligent homicide.
You're starting from a faulty assumption yourself. That a driver that is inattentive with autopilot, regardless of whether it's more likely or not, would be a safe driver otherwise.
What? I never said nor implied that. All I'm saying is that the auto-pilot leads a driver to be less attentive. I never said that the auto-pilot was necessarily less safe, in face, I explicitly said:
Now, just because the human with the autopilot is less attentive and able to respond to emergencies doesn't necessarily mean they have more accidents. The autopilot could be good enough even with the inattentive human it's still safer, but that's far from an obvious conclusion.
I'm just baffled by your resistance to acknowledging the obvious fact that a non-trivial portion of the drivers are less attentive with the auto-pilot enabled, and this potentially makes the auto-pilot less safe.
You would think wrong. You made a statement. One that is only related to mine in regards to automobiles and accidents. You don't make any point with it at all, you just made the statement. Further, I say that drivers should be attentive. That is a fact regardless of what features the vehicle has. An inattentive driver with autopilot is safer than an inattentive driver without autopilot.
You keep dodging the point I'm making.
A driver is more likely to be inattentive with an autopilot.
And that was the point of my statement, that saying the driver is supposed to be attentive is as useless as saying the driver is supposed to not crash. In both cases human error is a prerequisite of a crash, the question is how circumstances change the likelihood of those errors.
It's "potentially dangerous" in the same sense as repairing your own car, packing your own parachute, or building your own hang glider is dangerous. Yes, you can hurt or kill yourself, but if you know what you're doing, you can limit the risk to something reasonable.
More like building your own car or parachute. This isn't "non-expert does something that experts do routinely" it's "non-expert attempts something that experts are still trying to figure out how to do safely".
Furthermore, for human gene therapy, drug companies and the FDA really can't do much to reduce the risk anyway; most of the negative effects can only be observed in living human beings, so either you inject the therapy into a living human being or you don't get a gene therapy.
I'm sure researchers have more ways that live trials on humans to start testing the safety and efficacy of these treatments. As for the DIY, medical treatments are notoriously hard to measure outcomes for, I mean there's still people who swear by homeopathic treatments. DIY is not the way to figure out if these treatments work.
Are you trying to counter my point with a somewhat related, but contextually irrelevant statement? I said people should be actively involved in the driving process, and you said they should also avoid having accidents. I can only assume you mean people don't avoid having accidents, and so they will not be an active participant in the driving process with autopilot. However, most drivers do in fact avoid having accidents most of the time. I would also venture that most people that use autopilot are also competent drivers.
I think it's a very relevant statement.
Your argument relies on the assumption that people will be just as attentive while supervising the auto-pilot as they are while performing unassisted driving, but that's a false assumption.
Asking someone to pay attention while the auto-pilot is driving is a very difficult task, a far more difficult task than driving. If the auto-pilot makes a mistake there is a strong possibility the human will not be paying close enough attention to catch it. Telling them they're supposed to be paying attention is no more a solution than telling them they're not supposed to have traffic accidents. Humans are fallible, it's just a question of how fallible they are at a particular task.
This isn't something that really applies to cruise control or bake assist. Cruise control removes some attention from speed control, but you're arguably more engaged in steering, it's possible you end up safer. As for brake assist... do you mean collision avoidance? Either way it's only a fallback system so it's not going to divert any attention from driving.
Now, just because the human with the autopilot is less attentive and able to respond to emergencies doesn't necessarily mean they have more accidents. The autopilot could be good enough even with the inattentive human it's still safer, but that's far from an obvious conclusion.
Driving is supposed to be an active task, even with autopilot.
People are also supposed to avoid having traffic accidents.
Autopilot requires the driver to be attentive.
Humans are far worse at being attentive to passive tasks than they are at driving.
so if I'm a self driving car with no backup operator, do I prioritize the safety of my passengers? if I have to run down 5 people to keep my rider safe, do I do that? what if I have to do the whole run over your mother / a baby / a nun or run over a bunch of assholes? how are they ever going to solve for this, because whatever it chooses will be wrong
I don't think it counts. I think it's a simple set of tradeoffs, health > property, life > health, occupants > bystanders.
Ie, if given a choice between damaging the car or hurting a bystander it will damage the car.
If given the choice between smoking a pedestrian or a dangerous swerve into the ditch it chooses the ditch.
But if a pedestrian materializes in the middle of a bridge with no guardrails, well goodbye pedestrian.
Of course, that's a choice 1 or 2 generations down the line, right now it's a challenge just to keep them from killing people for no reason whatsoever.
As eluded to in the article you linked, the problem for Sebelius was using tax payer money, under 7324. That's why she paid the money back from political funds.
The article I saw didn't state the provision she was accused under, and the special council wasn't satisfied with her attempts at rectification.
7323(a) is limited by 7323(c), and the First Amendment.
Appointed policy makers (which are political positions by nature) can, like everyone else, state their political opinions. 7323(c) states that clearly, in case there was any confusion. 7323(a) says they can't use their OFFICIAL AUTHORITY to affect an election, such as by ordering government resources, employees or money, be used to advance a political campaign. It does NOT say they can't state their opinions. Subsection (c) makes it very clear they can state their opinions.
That's if it wasn't obvious - politics is arguing about policy (politics and policy are from the same root word), so obviously policy makers are going to talk about politics - that's their job.
All this talk of exact wording and you're leaving off half a clause?
(1) use his official authority or influence for the purpose of interfering with or affecting the result of an election;
Now I don't know if appearing as an FCC commissioner counts more as "authority" or "influence", but he was appearing at CPAC as an FCC commissioner advocating for a specific political candidate.
The idea of the Hatch act is to draw a line between political campaigns and the operation of the federal government. A government official, endorsing candidates in their official capacity, crosses that line. It's exactly one of the kinds of activity the Hatch act was meant to stop.
If you want to know what the Hatch Act says, the Act itself is probably shorter than that Comey article. You can see for yourself exactly what it says, with no worry that the reporter is spinning it.
Are you a lawyer who specializes in this area of law? Because I'm not.
A good honest reporter will actually talk to experts who know what they're talking about and include that information in that article. We're trying to parse a weirdly formatted document making constant assumptions about the meaning of terms and phrases that might be completely unjustified.
Perhaps the most interesting bit is 7324 subsection (B).
It says that people who are always on duty, because they are appointed officials rather than 9-5 employees, still have their first amendment rights. They can voice their political opinions just like everyone else, and the "not while on duty" rule doesn't apply to them since they are on duty 24/7.
I think that's part of what you're getting wrong.
It's not saying they're on duty 24/7, it's saying their position continues outside of normal work hours so at any moment you can be on duty. For instance, if you're appearing at CPAC as an FCC commissioner you're on duty, however, if you're at a BBQ chatting with friends you're not on duty. Unless one of those friends happens to be a CEO of a telecom bugging you about a policy and they you might be on duty again. It means your on-duty status is determined by the role you're playing in the moment, not by whether you're in the office during regular working hours.
But the office of special council's letter didn't actually talk about 7324, it talked about 7323(a)(1), using his position to interfere in an election. O'Reilly was appearing at CPAC in his capacity as an FCC commissioner when he advocated for a specific candidate in an election.
It's not a novel interpretation, Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services got nabbed for a very similar infraction.
I suspect everyone breaks one law or another every day and doesn't know it.
Sure... but this is also a law he really shouldn't have broken.
His job is to help administer the FCC, not be a partisan hack speaking at CPAC and pumping Trump's candidacy.
Normal ethical people understand their roles come with a responsibility beyond partisanship and tend to avoid repeatedly violating laws meant to ensure ethical behaviour.
This is bizarre. I wonder if anyone involved in this has READ the Hatch Act.
Yes, they probably even read further than the Wikipedia entry!
I'm definitely not an expert but was curious so I checked a few sources on the matter.
As near as I can tell only the POTUS and VP are completely exempt from the law. The provisions you pointed out don't mean that positions subject to Senate confirmation are exempt from the entire act, just portions of it.
Here I don't think the problem was that he was an FCC commissioner appearing at CPAC (though I think that breaks the spirit of the law). But that speaking as an FCC commissioner he advocated for Trump's candidacy.
If he had been appearing at CPAC just as himself he'd probably be fine.
If your phone bill isn't paying part of 30,000 salaries, that would be a considerable consumer advantage.
Considerable stock owner advantage sure, but less competition generally means higher prices, the savings won't end up in the consumer's pocket.
Some school districts in CA are pushing $40K in expenses per student, with the high being New Jerusalem Elementary School District coming in at $119,000 per student. Even it it was an average of $13K (which is about the average for California), the average class size is around 22, meaning close to $300K per classroom. A bit of math will show that teacher salary is around 20% of all student spending. That's the issue - so much money is going to things beyond education.
I don't know about all of them but it looks like the top one is exploiting rules regarding Charter schools.
I'd need to see some proper media reports to understand what's going on in general since those schools over $50k per student seem kind of ridiculous.
has a projected budget that averages out to about $37,400 per student.
I know there are considerations like property upkeep, and administration, but holy moly, why not just bus them to a nearby community college at that rate?
I'm not sure where you live, but your numbers seem to be wildly off.
The average is close to $11k, with the highest state at $21k.
In my country its up to the parents to buy textbooks and materials for their children. Why isn't it like that in the USA? Or do only rich White or Asian parents do that, not the poor or Black or Hispanic parents?
Buy their own binders, papers, and pencils sure. But textbooks?
I'm not sure what country you live in but that seems like a bizarrely inefficient system. Every student needs the same textbooks and they don't serve the student after the end of the school year. Forcing the parents to buy them just creates a big inefficient resale market where there's no need for one.
Making the parents buy the textbooks is effectively just a poorly administered tax on parents.
Has nobody thought this through? What's a reef going to do with 379 million dollars?
Invest in SpongeBob SquarePants lunchboxes?
Reality is, the reef goes through ups and downs. You can't control the whole reef like a theme park, there will always be dead zones and regenerating zones. It's way to big to control.
Yeah, life finds a way, species and ecosystems find ways to adapt to whatever we throw at them.
Just ask the Passenger pigeon.
1) Is contra-indicated by his behavior up until this year. Reportedly in some ways he was even more ruthless than his father. His rhetoric was even more aggressive.
2) More likely this, specifically the aftermath of the nuclear test site collapse seemed to be a key turning point. Not only would this have likely set back their program, perhaps beyond recovery, it also demonstrated how much damage their messing around could do to the geology, right on China's border.After that point, everything toned downed rapidly. A few weeks ago he suddenly was willing to meet.
Then a couple of weeks ago, presumable at China's insistance, Kim Jong Un went to Beijing. We are note privy to what happened in that meeting, but afterward, NK was much more concrete about terms to wind things down, though the general overtures were promising prior to that.
Trump's rhetoric *probably* wasn't it, perhaps the elevated sanctions contributed, but I suspect if not for the test site incident, they'd still be betting on threat of force by nukes to keep things going until they'd control South Korea on their terms. Now it seems they've decided to appease the international community in exchange for guarantees their internal affairs would be left alone (which the rest of the world has already seemed content to leave alone, regardless of severity of atrocity).
3) NK has what they always wanted, Nukes and long range missiles. They don't really need to perform more tests of any kind since they do have credible deterrence against an attack. So now they enter the part of the game where they start playing nice and see what they can get.
But don't expect the Nukes or Missiles to actually go anywhere, Kim Jong Un knows they might be the only reason he made it out of this last showdown without getting attacked.
Nah, it probably has more to do with the fact that they have Nukes and long range missiles.
I wonder how they plan to credibly enforce the Denuclearization. It's relatively easy to monitor the development of Nukes, you need nuclear plants to get the plutonium and testing ranges to debug the tech. But once a country has working Nukes I don't know how you verify that they've been surrendered.
Just look at all the goodwill!
With surprising speed and warmth, the presidents of North and South Korea reached a broad agreement on Wednesday to work for peace and unity on their bitterly divided peninsula, the biggest step by either side to ease tensions in 50 years.
The agreement, which came after more than three hours of talks in the North Korea capital, Pyongyang, on the second day of their first summit meeting, was signed and toasted by President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea and President Kim Jong Il of the North, who were shown on South Korean television clinking champagne glasses, shaking hands vigorously and smiling broadly.
[...]
The general points agreed on included the need for reconciliation and unification; the establishment of peace; the commencement in August of exchange visits by members of divided families; and more cultural exchanges.
Wait a minute... Kim Jong... Il?
Oooooh, that article is talking about the peace breakthrough from 2000. My bad, just got the wrong link!
they're still the Gatekeepers to virtually all content. They can raise the price as high as they want. WallStreet has to know that.
Offering media means you're offering special content no one else can deliver, you can charge a higher premium.
Once you're just a utility all you can sell is bits, consumers find it a lot easier to compare packages so margins are lower.
Due to the Trump tax breaks and repeal of net neutrality, the communications cabal is racking in record profits:
Comcast Q1 2018 profit beats expectation:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/2...
Verizon : Q1 2018 MASSIVE profit boost of 32%
https://www.highgeekly.com/bus...
These companies are carving up the internet (Comcast is "bundling Netflix", oh, and if you don't pay the higher Comcast rate, your traffic 'flix gets punished aka: deprioritized) and monetizing user data just EXACTLY as the NN supporters claimed would happen. The result is massive profits... which drive stock prices, higher consumer costs, and poorer user experience...
They got the bump from the tax cut in December when it passed, any NN stock bump would already be priced in as well.
But now the market is responding to the fact that people are dropping their cable subscriptions faster than expected.
Trump has no leverage?? He played his cards perfectly here - even looking at his "worst" tweets, he was basically calling Kim's bluff. This was literally a country that can't even provide electricity for it's citizens trying to act tough against the world's largest military power. He got China to back off from NK's support by trying to provoke the US. Only NK is that stupid, and perhaps Russia as well but they actually have some power to back up their words.
And most (Chinese) companies violating the sanctions quickly realize the US is a far, far, far more valuable trading partner than NK ever will be if they were called out on their actions.
It finally took someone to play hardball to solve the problem. Same thing will happen with Palestine.
I was actually talking about Iran when it came to Trump having no leverage.
He does have leverage when it comes to NK, but it's more limited than you imply. The sanctions are only effective as their enforcement, and China has a lot of latitude in how strictly they enforce them and to the extent they turn a blind eye to smuggling. And the companies who trade in NK are regional, so they don't care about US markets.
Plus sanctions only hurt the citizens, not the leaders, and Kim isn't that concerned about his citizens. He'd prefer them to be better fed, and there's always the worry that too much starvation leads to revolution, but sanctions are really for show.
Obama couldn't stop Kim and neither could Trump, that's why Kim now has long range Nukes and is willing to talk.
So far, Kim is the only one who's actually gotten what he wants out of this whole thing.
Some hardware gets cheaper some of the time. I've noticed for instance that the old-fashioned mechanical watches that were the staple of the last century have not gotten any cheaper at all.
The cheap old-fashioned mechanical watches of the last century vanished from the market, replaced by cheap digital watches, smartphones, and fitbits.
The mechanical watches available now are more jewellery than watch.
Recently the price of high-end GPUs has skyrocketed.
That's mostly a supply shortage caused by cryptocurrency miners. Though I'm curious what will happen if mining stays profitable longterm.
Mass production of some goods can cause them to become cheaper but this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
There are exceptions, but I see no reason that car sensors would get more expensive when self-driving cars become mainstream.