...over the ten year warranty period you'll save ~$3000...
That number is way off. You have performed the calculation incorrectly because you omitted the opportunity cost. If you do the calculation correctly, then I estimate (using amateurish cost-accounting methods below) that you end up at around break-even if you buy the battery. Which is extremely interesting, because, assuming rational consumers, as manufacturing costs fall, that would be the consumer price threshold at which these batteries could be marketed and they just started being marketed at that price.
So about the opportunity cost: I have no idea what value is conventional to use as the opportunity cost. But the stock market seems like a reasonable choice. So if you invest the initial $3,500.00 in the stock market instead of buying a battery, and we assume 6.5% returns compounded annually, that works out to to an increase of $3069.98 over ten years. That is the about the same gain., ~$3,000, which estimated in savings on your electric bill after the recouping the battery investment. So you are about $3,000 better off after ten years either if you invest a sum of $3,500.00 in the stock market or if you invest the same sum in a home battery.
Of course there would be more things to consider in making an accurate calculation: differing tax treatments, risk and uncertainty between the choices, what residual worth your battery has after 10 years and its rate of depreciation, the inflation-reduced value of the initial $3,500.00 had you invested it. Also, to do the comparison correctly, assume that the accumulating savings on your electric bill are invested after the battery is paid off. Maybe someone who actually knows how to do cost accounting will chime in here with better estimates. Nonetheless, the claim that you neglected to account for significant opportunity cost stands, even if I failed to calculate that cost conventionally or sufficiently accurately.
And for those who get their medical advice from Playboy's Playmate of the Year there is Jenny McCarthy, of whom Wikipedia reports:
"McCarthy's public presence and vocal activism on the vaccination-autism controversy, led, in 2008, to her being awarded the James Randi Educational Foundation's Pigasus Award, which is a tongue-in-cheek award granted for contributions to pseudoscience..."
"McCarthy's claims that vaccines cause autism are not supported by any medical evidence, and the original paper by Andrew Wakefield that formed the basis for the claims...
"In January 2011, McCarthy defended Wakefield..."
So in honor of Ms. McCarthy, can we henceforth refer to populist medical quackery practiced by uncredentialed public attention seekers as "Jenny McCarthyism?"
$200 million dollars for 224 low income family homes. I get that there are lots of construction costs other than just the houses, but that still seems like a pretty steep price per home.
Lucas already owns the land so that is purely construction cost, and therefore he must be building luxury housing for the poor. Nothing unusual about that. In fact, government Section 8 housing vouchers are capped at $2,200/month. So a low income apartment could rent for $2,200.00 tax payers contribution + renters contribution.
Lucas will recover some of it back in revenue from rents. At $200 million for 224 homes that is $892,857.00 per home. A low-income person can afford up to $2,200/month in rent. So $892,857.00 per apartment / $2,200 monthly rent / 12months per year = about 34 years. So he would be break-even on construction costs after 34 years. Of course that is a ball-park figure because some costs and some benefits (tax deductions) are excluded in that calculation.
The late jazz critic Whitney Balliet wrote, "All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting."
With that in mind, perhaps the AGW alarmists would be willing to confront popular criticisms of their ideology, as opposed to making the usual straw man arguments.
You can believe any damned thing you like, but the right to refuse service to a customer is a right NOBODY else has...
Let us test your statement using a thought experiment. Consider the following three hypothetical scenarios:
1. A print shop is owned and operated by a Jewish woman. She holds passionate beliefs about religious freedom both as matter of principle and for reasons more personal: Though her parents escaped the Holocaust her grandparents and other relatives were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her father, a brilliant physicist, had been refused academic positions in the united states early in his career because he was Jewish. One day Grand Wizard of the local KKK branch visits her print shop and requests that she print racist material for an upcoming meeting. She refuses. The KKK Wizard informs the local DA that the print shop owner has committed the crime of refusing him service. It is an easy case for the DA to prosecute because the printer admits to her crime, insisting during the trial the she will never print racist literature and that should she should have the freedom to refuse business to any group with which she disagrees. She is given a five year jail sentence and fined $250,000.00. She raises some of the money to pay the fine by selling her business, and she and her husband sell their home. While she is in jail Her husband and children move into a small apartment but they can not afford much because is saving as much as much as he can to pay the remainder of the fine. While the KKK can no longer use the local print shop, it's not a problem. The $250,000.00 which they received in restitution is sufficient to purchase their own equipment. The select Apple computers because they know the Apple CEO welcomes them, having proudly proclaimed that Apple is "Open to everyone."
2. A coffee shop owner. His business is flourishing and he feels well, though things were hard for him in the past. While still dealing with the psychological trauma of having been molested by a Catholic priest as child, he feels that he is over the depression and with help of a therapist has overcome feelings of guilt. One day a customer walks into his coffee shop and orders a bagel and coffee. The owner notices that the man is wearing a pro-NAMBLA shirt and ask if it is a joke. The customer replies that it is not, that he is member and supports the organization. The owner informs the customer that it is private establishment, the customer is not welcome, and asks him to leave. When the customer refuses, the owner calls the police to have him removed. The police arrive and arrest the coffee shop owner for refusing to provide service. During the court proceeding the owner pleads with the judge and jury for leniency and explains his traumatic past. The judge is sympathetic and issues a sentence of three years in jail and a fine of $200,000.00, the legal minimum sentence for the crime of refusing a customer service. The customer is able to make an extra large donation to NAMBLA with part of his restitution funds.
3. A woman and her wife operate a catering service. The local Catholic minister requests that they cater events at the local Catholic church. Being open-minded and anxious to expand their business, they agree. But soon they find that they are uncomfortable in that environment. While many church-goers are aware of their homosexual marriage and are friendly, others are rude. The often feel snubbed. The sermons about the sins of homosexuality, to which they are unwillingly subject, are upsetting to them. They inform the minster that this makes them uncomfortable and can no longer cater events at the Church. The minister informs the police that the women have committed a crime by refusing service and the caterers arrested and subsequently convicted. They do not appeal, feeling that it would by hypocritical to do so after having advocated for the law under which they are convicted, the Religious Freedom Revocation Act of 2
Past supporters of RFRA acts include Barack Obama (who voted for one as Illinois State Senator) and Bill Clinton (who signed one into law as President). So Tim Cook's position is not in the political mainstream and in fact it is even outside the liberal Democrat mainstream. The news here is Tim Cook inappropriately dragging Apple into a political war to endorse his own radical politics, not anything going on in Indiana.
Cooks' statements are also not based on any actual facts. See background on RFRA here.
Not long ago Apple stood for fanatical devotion to great design. Now it stands for tasteless bling and Tim Cook's political agenda. We all know the heartbreaking history of that company. It is made even sadder by Cook's failure to stay true to the vision.
from:
Apple: Insanely great design.
to:
Apple: Indiana is a bunch of Anti-homosexual Christian Bigots.
Tim Cook is not qualified to lead Apple. Not because he is gay (nothing wrong with that in my opinion) but because he is ruining the corporate image by putting his personal politics ahead of Apple's interests. If any other employee at Apple used the Apple name to endorse his own personal political views, that employee wold be fired. The same policy should apply to Cook.
All of that energy is dissipated as heat. Which means in the winter months when you are paying to heat your house the cost of sleep mode is the difference in price between heating your home with electricity which the console uses and heating your home by whatever other means you have, wood/gas/coal, whatever. In the summer months if you are running your air conditioner then the price is the sum of the console electricity and the added amount which running your air conditioner to pump out the heat from the console.
So if you live in the arctic circle and heat your home with electricity then the price the price is $0.00, not $10 - $15 as they claim.
It does seem that the most likely explanation is a suicide/homicide by the co-pilot, though the published evidence to date is also consistent with a terrorist act by any of these methods. Perhaps these are better regarded as exploits which the airlines do not protect against, entertainment for conspiracy theorists, or potential plot lines for a film:
1. Impostor hijacking: Terrorists kill the real co-pilot and steal his credentials before he reaches the airport. An impostor then passes security checks using the stolen credentials. Once past the security checkpoints the imposter switches to a second set of forged credentials from the stolen credentials. This works because the security guards who check the credentials are unlikely to know the pilot but are likely to detect forged credentials. The other airline employees are likely to know the real pilot and thus detect an impostor, but would be unable to detect forged credentials of someone posing as new airline pilot.
2. Greater Threat Scenario: Terrorist operatives disguised as government officials approach the co-pilot and inform him that the plane which he will l fly that day is rigged with a thermonuclear weapon triggered to explode either when it reaches its destination, if it deviates at all from its scheduled route, or if anyone attempts to diffuse it. He is told that the only way to prevent the loss of millions of lives is to fly the plane on its scheduled route and to crash it in a remote region. He is also told that he can not trust the pilot.
3. Drugged Pilots: Terrorists attempt to drug both the pilot and co-pilot with a custom time-released hallucinogen mixture which induces paranoid delusions and homicidal behavior. They fail to drug the pilot though because he skips his breakfast.
Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.
Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.
Bingo, we have winner there. So if governments internalized externalities by charging polluters to pollute, making the price of coal reflect its true cost, then the price of nuclear energy would be more favorable in comparison than now. Without those conditions, we are now all subsidizing the most polluting forms of energy generation, such as coal, by making polluting free.
I know the free market libertarian types will scream bloody murder about the proposal that pollution be taxed, just because it is a tax and they reflexively hate all taxes. But hold on you free market libertarian type people! If the government returned payments from polluters directly to the public in the form of checks, instead of letting the crooks who run our government squander it, then the net tax rate would be zero because the total tax dollars collected from polluters would equal the total tax dollars returned to the public. There is a redistributionary aspect to this tax, and those are typically regarded as a bad because they create price distortions. But in this case it is a good because it corrects, not creates, a price distortion by redistributing dollars away from polluters in proportion to the cost of their polluting.
There is a noteworthy point there: taxation is not a burden. The burden of Government is not taxation but instead spending inefficiency. Consider the following: You can go to the grocery store and pay $2.00 to buy a bag of onions. Alternatively, the government can tax you $2.00 and provide you bag the same bag of onions. The tax payer is rationally indifferent to those alternatives, therefore the tax is not a burden to the tax payer. What makes government a burden is spending inefficiency: In actuality, the government taxes you $2.00 and instead of giving you $2.00 worth onions it buys a tobacco farmer subsidy, anti-marijuana law enforcement, spyware to read your e-mail, and corporate welfare in the form of bad loans to Solyndra or some other boondoggle. What fraction does go to anything which is of value to the public, such as perhaps housing, is filtered through government contractors who capture most of the dollars for themselves and creates unemployment by offering an incentive to not work.
Because the public would pay money for the government not to do some of those things government spending efficiency can be negative. For example, with low government spending efficiency the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $3.00 if the government uses its $2.00 to purchase $1.00 worth of harm to the taxpayer. With high government spending efficiency, the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $-1.00, that is, the tax payer gives up two dollars but gains $3.00. In practice that does not happen. If it did then Wall Street investors would all have been replaced by government bureaucrats, if they can earn that rate of return.
So if the government both taxes pollution and returns the tax revenues to the public as dollars then taxation is not a net social burden. And the reduction in pollution is a net social benefit.
...The (Republican) backers response? Apparently they think participants/Patients should sign a waiver agreeing that the raw study data might be made public, or they can simply choose not to participate in the study.
Oh come on moderators! That is false, false, false false. It does not deserve the +5 informative.
As many other posts here have correctly pointed out, there is no such requirement for a signed a waiver. According to HIPAA patient data can be published if it is stripped of personal identifying information such as names and soc. numbers. The falsehood that the Democrats are pushing is that research data must be either kept secret from the public or that, impractically, the personal identifying information must be publicly released with signed waivers.
This is about government officials trying to avoid public accountability by keeping secrets. Please stop enabling that by modding up propaganda.
So does this ruling apply to the public or only to government?
For example, could I legally collect Elizabeth Warren's "inadvertently shed" DNA and have it tested to find out if she really has a Native American ancestor?
If this is something only the government can do legally, then what law gives them but not me the right to collect other people's DNA and have it analyzed without their permission?
More to the point, is there any law preventing me or anyone else from doing this right now? I can see James O'Keefe with a cotton swab and vial chasing Elizabeth Warren across the Harvard campus.
"There are just so many places where Wi-Fi doesn't reach," says Jan Dawson "and the quality of Wi-Fi that you can find is often subpar."
I bought the Republic first-generation Android Moto X phone about a year ago and have used their 4G/$40.00 a month plan since. The only wireless networks which I connect to are my home network, work network, and free networks in airports and hotels when I travel. Republic will throttle the data rate if I exceed 5GB of cell data usage in one billing period, about a month.
So now for the million dollar question: Does that work? With only those connection, do I break the caps because too much of my data travels over cell towers instead of wifi? Ya, it works. I never get even close to the caps. Partly this is because the phone is smart about deferring low-priority high-bandwidth tasks until it picks up a wifi network. The big one here is auto synching photo and video to my google photo account. The other thing is my usage pattern is normally not to gobble up a lot of data while in transit because I commute to work by driving. If I were streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime video daily on an Amtrak commute then I might have a problem, depending on how severely they throttle.
There is more to Republic than just their wifi/cell tower technology: They work really hard not to be assholes about billing. There are no lock-in contracts and amazingly, you can conveniently change your cell plan up to twice a month, from $5.00 wifi-only policy to higher data rates at $10, $25 and $40 per month plans. The amount you are billed never exceeds those limits, regardless of your usage, they just throttle data rates instead of adding more to your bill.
I have only one gripe: I use my Republic phone with Google Voice and mostly the voice lag was insanely long. Seems to have improved a lot recently though. Not sure if that is attributable to the phone, to Google Voice, or to the two in combination.
Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page.
I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDARoffered at SparkFun from PulsedLight, which, according to this YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.
We offer evidence that legalized abortion has contributed signiZcantly to recent crime reductions. Crime began to fall roughly eighteen years after abortion legalization. The Zve states that allowed abortion in 1970 experienced declines earlier than the rest of the nation, which legalized in 1973 with Roe v. Wade. States with high abortion rates in the 1970s and 1980s experienced greater crime reductions in the 1990s. In high abortion states, only arrests of those born after abortion legalization fall relative to low abortion states. Legalized abortion appears to account for as much as 50 percent of the recent drop in crime.
If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.
There is a great interview with Elon Musk on youtube here. He is remarkably transparent about his reasoning. One key to his success is that he works very hard to understand motive and purpose when making decisions.
Musk makes that point that it costs about as much to fuel a rocket as it does to fuel a 747. Space launches are mostly so expensive because the vehicle is sacrificed with each launch, not because of the energy requirements for a space launch. The other big component of the expense is that rocket manufacturers charge a lot. According to Musk the value of the raw materials from which they are formed is reasonably inexpensive. Those were two hugely important realizations because they meant that space launches were not inherently expensive and therefore there is enormous potential for reducing launch costs.
By being Space X instead of Boeing the cost of launch is reduced to about 25% of conventional launches because Space X can assemble a rocket from raw materials for that much less. A re-usable vehicle, Musk predicts, would reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude.
So those are the motives and reasoning underlying the X-wing grid fins and re-entry discussed in the Slashdot summary.
your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being
I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.
I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead programmer is having something of a breakdown in front of the project manager and they both happen to be standing in front of the entrance to my cubicle. So all I could do was wait there and listen. Turns out that the lead programmer had been devoting all of her time, and struggling for months, to find any way to digest and print the document files previously used in the old oracle/COBOL/dumb terminal system in our new custom client software running on OS X and which was replacing the dumb terminals. So I stand there and listen to the irate complaints from the lead programmer about how the problem was impossible to solve. At the end of the conversation I ask if she would like me to take a look at it. I was done by about 2:00pm the same day. It was easy. I just asked the DB programmer in the cubicle next to me for a sample of a document file. Looks like gibberish so I figure it's not PostScript and therefore must by PCL. Download and install the free GhostPCL renderer, an offshoot of the GhostScript project. Built and installed it. Wrapped the command-line GhostScript in Cocoa's NSTask. Threw together a GUI in interface builder. Wrote a little glue code in Objective-C to invoke Cocoa native classes for loading and displaying the output of GhostPCL and to invoke my NSTask GhostPCL wrapper. And checked the GhostPCL license, which I think might have been GPL, but since I was running it as a separate process and not modifying the source, or redistributing it outside of or organization, we were not compelled to share our custom OS X client source.
Worked great. Everyone was happy. Except the lead programmer, who was livid and from then on set about trying to make my life hell. She banned the project manager from speaking to me. She excluded me from meetings.
The fundamental problem was that the lead programmer did not know how to code. That is not a criticism of her programming skill, I mean she really did not know how to code. As in, literally, could not have programmed a single line to save her life. (Although I can not think of an actual circumstance where anyone would have to do that.) She did not understand what a pointer is. Did not now how to check code out of the repository. Would not have done any good if she had because she did not know how to build code. (In XCode. You click the build button.) Being technically incompetent, she was completely preoccupied with compensating for her own lack of skill, and it was that, not the lack of skill itself, which caused the problems.
The noted gun rights advocate John Lott, Jr. makes a point here.
... consider the advice from PoliceOne, whose 450,000 members make it the largest private organization of active and retired law-enforcement officers in the U.S. It surveyed its members last March and asked, “What would help most in preventing large scale shootings in public?” Their No. 1 answer: “More permissive concealed carry policies for civilians.” (It was followed by “More aggressive institutionalization for mentally ill persons.”)
So my father grew up on a dairy farm near Frederick, Maryland in the 1940's. After the Columbine massacre I commented that that kind of thing, students shooting each other in school, seemed new and wondered what gave rise to it. He said he did not know, but that when he was in grade school, the boys brought rifles to school so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home. There was never a problem.
Some time later I ran into ESR somewhere or other, up on his gun rights hobby horse. I mentioned the thing about the squirrels. His only comment was, "that's a healthy gun culture."
I grew up in rural Ohio where hunting was an excusable absence from school. Many of my classmates owned guns. There were never any problems with threats or gun violence.
Children own guns. And that has been going on for a while. The student massacre thing is new. Which suggests that the underlying cause of these student-on-student gun massacres is not caused by the introduction of guns.
Tax avoidance schemes are remarkably common among large successful coporations. Other successful U.S. tech companies exploit the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" loophole. Ikea pays almost no tax by incorporating in Holland and exploiting its permissive rules for non-profits.
Which raises two questions:
- Are tax rates so high that it is necessary to engage in complicated tax avoidance schemes in western democracies to be successful in business?
- Is it best that companies do avoid taxes? Do we trust Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates to invest efficiently for the betterment of society more than we trust Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? And I would ask the same of the Republican counterparts of those politicians. Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth. I have never understood why, for those who believe wealth is dirty, that its transfer to the political class is somehow purifying.
Life appeared when the earth was tens of millions of years old, but evolution didn't go into high gear until the "Cambrian Explosion", nearly a billion years later.
Another leading theory which explains this delay is Snowball Earth, a super ice age enveloping the entire surface of the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
...over the ten year warranty period you'll save ~$3000...
That number is way off. You have performed the calculation incorrectly because you omitted the opportunity cost. If you do the calculation correctly, then I estimate (using amateurish cost-accounting methods below) that you end up at around break-even if you buy the battery. Which is extremely interesting, because, assuming rational consumers, as manufacturing costs fall, that would be the consumer price threshold at which these batteries could be marketed and they just started being marketed at that price.
So about the opportunity cost: I have no idea what value is conventional to use as the opportunity cost. But the stock market seems like a reasonable choice. So if you invest the initial $3,500.00 in the stock market instead of buying a battery, and we assume 6.5% returns compounded annually, that works out to to an increase of $3069.98 over ten years. That is the about the same gain., ~$3,000, which estimated in savings on your electric bill after the recouping the battery investment. So you are about $3,000 better off after ten years either if you invest a sum of $3,500.00 in the stock market or if you invest the same sum in a home battery.
Of course there would be more things to consider in making an accurate calculation: differing tax treatments, risk and uncertainty between the choices, what residual worth your battery has after 10 years and its rate of depreciation, the inflation-reduced value of the initial $3,500.00 had you invested it. Also, to do the comparison correctly, assume that the accumulating savings on your electric bill are invested after the battery is paid off. Maybe someone who actually knows how to do cost accounting will chime in here with better estimates. Nonetheless, the claim that you neglected to account for significant opportunity cost stands, even if I failed to calculate that cost conventionally or sufficiently accurately.
And for those who get their medical advice from Playboy's Playmate of the Year there is Jenny McCarthy, of whom Wikipedia reports:
"McCarthy's public presence and vocal activism on the vaccination-autism controversy, led, in 2008, to her being awarded the James Randi Educational Foundation's Pigasus Award, which is a tongue-in-cheek award granted for contributions to pseudoscience..."
"McCarthy's claims that vaccines cause autism are not supported by any medical evidence, and the original paper by Andrew Wakefield that formed the basis for the claims...
"In January 2011, McCarthy defended Wakefield..."
So in honor of Ms. McCarthy, can we henceforth refer to populist medical quackery practiced by uncredentialed public attention seekers as "Jenny McCarthyism?"
$200 million dollars for 224 low income family homes. I get that there are lots of construction costs other than just the houses, but that still seems like a pretty steep price per home.
Lucas already owns the land so that is purely construction cost, and therefore he must be building luxury housing for the poor. Nothing unusual about that. In fact, government Section 8 housing vouchers are capped at $2,200/month. So a low income apartment could rent for $2,200.00 tax payers contribution + renters contribution.
Lucas will recover some of it back in revenue from rents. At $200 million for 224 homes that is $892,857.00 per home. A low-income person can afford up to $2,200/month in rent. So $892,857.00 per apartment / $2,200 monthly rent / 12months per year = about 34 years. So he would be break-even on construction costs after 34 years. Of course that is a ball-park figure because some costs and some benefits (tax deductions) are excluded in that calculation.
From (the last sentence of) the linked article:
You're arguing for a flat tax.
Republicans prefer a flat tax, Democrats prefer a fat tax.
The late jazz critic Whitney Balliet wrote, "All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting."
With that in mind, perhaps the AGW alarmists would be willing to confront popular criticisms of their ideology, as opposed to making the usual straw man arguments.
"Climate Change Is Real. Too Bad Accurate Climate Models Aren’t." would be a good starting place.
Let us test your statement using a thought experiment. Consider the following three hypothetical scenarios:
1. A print shop is owned and operated by a Jewish woman. She holds passionate beliefs about religious freedom both as matter of principle and for reasons more personal: Though her parents escaped the Holocaust her grandparents and other relatives were gassed at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Her father, a brilliant physicist, had been refused academic positions in the united states early in his career because he was Jewish. One day Grand Wizard of the local KKK branch visits her print shop and requests that she print racist material for an upcoming meeting. She refuses. The KKK Wizard informs the local DA that the print shop owner has committed the crime of refusing him service. It is an easy case for the DA to prosecute because the printer admits to her crime, insisting during the trial the she will never print racist literature and that should she should have the freedom to refuse business to any group with which she disagrees. She is given a five year jail sentence and fined $250,000.00. She raises some of the money to pay the fine by selling her business, and she and her husband sell their home. While she is in jail Her husband and children move into a small apartment but they can not afford much because is saving as much as much as he can to pay the remainder of the fine. While the KKK can no longer use the local print shop, it's not a problem. The $250,000.00 which they received in restitution is sufficient to purchase their own equipment. The select Apple computers because they know the Apple CEO welcomes them, having proudly proclaimed that Apple is "Open to everyone."
2. A coffee shop owner. His business is flourishing and he feels well, though things were hard for him in the past. While still dealing with the psychological trauma of having been molested by a Catholic priest as child, he feels that he is over the depression and with help of a therapist has overcome feelings of guilt. One day a customer walks into his coffee shop and orders a bagel and coffee. The owner notices that the man is wearing a pro-NAMBLA shirt and ask if it is a joke. The customer replies that it is not, that he is member and supports the organization. The owner informs the customer that it is private establishment, the customer is not welcome, and asks him to leave. When the customer refuses, the owner calls the police to have him removed. The police arrive and arrest the coffee shop owner for refusing to provide service. During the court proceeding the owner pleads with the judge and jury for leniency and explains his traumatic past. The judge is sympathetic and issues a sentence of three years in jail and a fine of $200,000.00, the legal minimum sentence for the crime of refusing a customer service. The customer is able to make an extra large donation to NAMBLA with part of his restitution funds.
3. A woman and her wife operate a catering service. The local Catholic minister requests that they cater events at the local Catholic church. Being open-minded and anxious to expand their business, they agree. But soon they find that they are uncomfortable in that environment. While many church-goers are aware of their homosexual marriage and are friendly, others are rude. The often feel snubbed. The sermons about the sins of homosexuality, to which they are unwillingly subject, are upsetting to them. They inform the minster that this makes them uncomfortable and can no longer cater events at the Church. The minister informs the police that the women have committed a crime by refusing service and the caterers arrested and subsequently convicted. They do not appeal, feeling that it would by hypocritical to do so after having advocated for the law under which they are convicted, the Religious Freedom Revocation Act of 2
Past supporters of RFRA acts include Barack Obama (who voted for one as Illinois State Senator) and Bill Clinton (who signed one into law as President). So Tim Cook's position is not in the political mainstream and in fact it is even outside the liberal Democrat mainstream. The news here is Tim Cook inappropriately dragging Apple into a political war to endorse his own radical politics, not anything going on in Indiana.
Cooks' statements are also not based on any actual facts. See background on RFRA here.
Not long ago Apple stood for fanatical devotion to great design. Now it stands for tasteless bling and Tim Cook's political agenda. We all know the heartbreaking history of that company. It is made even sadder by Cook's failure to stay true to the vision.
from:
Apple: Insanely great design.
to:
Apple: Indiana is a bunch of Anti-homosexual Christian Bigots.
Tim Cook is not qualified to lead Apple. Not because he is gay (nothing wrong with that in my opinion) but because he is ruining the corporate image by putting his personal politics ahead of Apple's interests. If any other employee at Apple used the Apple name to endorse his own personal political views, that employee wold be fired. The same policy should apply to Cook.
Their calculations are ludicrously incorrect.
All of that energy is dissipated as heat. Which means in the winter months when you are paying to heat your house the cost of sleep mode is the difference in price between heating your home with electricity which the console uses and heating your home by whatever other means you have, wood/gas/coal, whatever. In the summer months if you are running your air conditioner then the price is the sum of the console electricity and the added amount which running your air conditioner to pump out the heat from the console.
So if you live in the arctic circle and heat your home with electricity then the price the price is $0.00, not $10 - $15 as they claim.
It does seem that the most likely explanation is a suicide/homicide by the co-pilot, though the published evidence to date is also consistent with a terrorist act by any of these methods. Perhaps these are better regarded as exploits which the airlines do not protect against, entertainment for conspiracy theorists, or potential plot lines for a film:
1. Impostor hijacking: Terrorists kill the real co-pilot and steal his credentials before he reaches the airport. An impostor then passes security checks using the stolen credentials. Once past the security checkpoints the imposter switches to a second set of forged credentials from the stolen credentials. This works because the security guards who check the credentials are unlikely to know the pilot but are likely to detect forged credentials. The other airline employees are likely to know the real pilot and thus detect an impostor, but would be unable to detect forged credentials of someone posing as new airline pilot.
2. Greater Threat Scenario: Terrorist operatives disguised as government officials approach the co-pilot and inform him that the plane which he will l fly that day is rigged with a thermonuclear weapon triggered to explode either when it reaches its destination, if it deviates at all from its scheduled route, or if anyone attempts to diffuse it. He is told that the only way to prevent the loss of millions of lives is to fly the plane on its scheduled route and to crash it in a remote region. He is also told that he can not trust the pilot.
3. Drugged Pilots: Terrorists attempt to drug both the pilot and co-pilot with a custom time-released hallucinogen mixture which induces paranoid delusions and homicidal behavior. They fail to drug the pilot though because he skips his breakfast.
Politicians use the expression "public-private partnership" like it is a good thing.
Libertarianism doesn't dismiss externalities and solutions to them. Take your slurs elsewhere.
I agree with with you completely. I just put that in there because Libertarian bashing is automatically worth a few positive mod points on Slashdot.
Those dangers pale to uncertainty and mismanagement caused by political instead of scientific evidence and method based environments.
Other energy sources would be vastly more costly if their waste products weren't already grandfathered in to the public mindset and their true impacts to safety and environmental impact (which is far more spread out than the catastrophic results failures induced by idiocy and insanity cause newer power sources) were actually measured and factored in to the comparison.
Bingo, we have winner there. So if governments internalized externalities by charging polluters to pollute, making the price of coal reflect its true cost, then the price of nuclear energy would be more favorable in comparison than now. Without those conditions, we are now all subsidizing the most polluting forms of energy generation, such as coal, by making polluting free.
I know the free market libertarian types will scream bloody murder about the proposal that pollution be taxed, just because it is a tax and they reflexively hate all taxes. But hold on you free market libertarian type people! If the government returned payments from polluters directly to the public in the form of checks, instead of letting the crooks who run our government squander it, then the net tax rate would be zero because the total tax dollars collected from polluters would equal the total tax dollars returned to the public. There is a redistributionary aspect to this tax, and those are typically regarded as a bad because they create price distortions. But in this case it is a good because it corrects, not creates, a price distortion by redistributing dollars away from polluters in proportion to the cost of their polluting.
There is a noteworthy point there: taxation is not a burden. The burden of Government is not taxation but instead spending inefficiency. Consider the following: You can go to the grocery store and pay $2.00 to buy a bag of onions. Alternatively, the government can tax you $2.00 and provide you bag the same bag of onions. The tax payer is rationally indifferent to those alternatives, therefore the tax is not a burden to the tax payer. What makes government a burden is spending inefficiency: In actuality, the government taxes you $2.00 and instead of giving you $2.00 worth onions it buys a tobacco farmer subsidy, anti-marijuana law enforcement, spyware to read your e-mail, and corporate welfare in the form of bad loans to Solyndra or some other boondoggle. What fraction does go to anything which is of value to the public, such as perhaps housing, is filtered through government contractors who capture most of the dollars for themselves and creates unemployment by offering an incentive to not work.
Because the public would pay money for the government not to do some of those things government spending efficiency can be negative. For example, with low government spending efficiency the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $3.00 if the government uses its $2.00 to purchase $1.00 worth of harm to the taxpayer. With high government spending efficiency, the cost to the tax payer of a $2.00 tax could be $-1.00, that is, the tax payer gives up two dollars but gains $3.00. In practice that does not happen. If it did then Wall Street investors would all have been replaced by government bureaucrats, if they can earn that rate of return.
So if the government both taxes pollution and returns the tax revenues to the public as dollars then taxation is not a net social burden. And the reduction in pollution is a net social benefit.
...The (Republican) backers response? Apparently they think participants/Patients should sign a waiver agreeing that the raw study data might be made public, or they can simply choose not to participate in the study.
Oh come on moderators! That is false, false, false false. It does not deserve the +5 informative.
As many other posts here have correctly pointed out, there is no such requirement for a signed a waiver. According to HIPAA patient data can be published if it is stripped of personal identifying information such as names and soc. numbers. The falsehood that the Democrats are pushing is that research data must be either kept secret from the public or that, impractically, the personal identifying information must be publicly released with signed waivers.
This is about government officials trying to avoid public accountability by keeping secrets. Please stop enabling that by modding up propaganda.
So does this ruling apply to the public or only to government?
For example, could I legally collect Elizabeth Warren's "inadvertently shed" DNA and have it tested to find out if she really has a Native American ancestor?
If this is something only the government can do legally, then what law gives them but not me the right to collect other people's DNA and have it analyzed without their permission?
More to the point, is there any law preventing me or anyone else from doing this right now? I can see James O'Keefe with a cotton swab and vial chasing Elizabeth Warren across the Harvard campus.
from the summary:
I bought the Republic first-generation Android Moto X phone about a year ago and have used their 4G/$40.00 a month plan since. The only wireless networks which I connect to are my home network, work network, and free networks in airports and hotels when I travel. Republic will throttle the data rate if I exceed 5GB of cell data usage in one billing period, about a month.
So now for the million dollar question: Does that work? With only those connection, do I break the caps because too much of my data travels over cell towers instead of wifi? Ya, it works. I never get even close to the caps. Partly this is because the phone is smart about deferring low-priority high-bandwidth tasks until it picks up a wifi network. The big one here is auto synching photo and video to my google photo account. The other thing is my usage pattern is normally not to gobble up a lot of data while in transit because I commute to work by driving. If I were streaming Netflix or Amazon Prime video daily on an Amtrak commute then I might have a problem, depending on how severely they throttle.
There is more to Republic than just their wifi/cell tower technology: They work really hard not to be assholes about billing. There are no lock-in contracts and amazingly, you can conveniently change your cell plan up to twice a month, from $5.00 wifi-only policy to higher data rates at $10, $25 and $40 per month plans. The amount you are billed never exceeds those limits, regardless of your usage, they just throttle data rates instead of adding more to your bill.
I have only one gripe: I use my Republic phone with Google Voice and mostly the voice lag was insanely long. Seems to have improved a lot recently though. Not sure if that is attributable to the phone, to Google Voice, or to the two in combination.
Local Motors is an investment of Bre Petis, of Makerbot fame, as noted on his web page.
I don't know if it is deliberate viral marketing strategy of his or just good investment instinct, but I have noticed that products which make headlines on tech sites trace back to his investments. Another example is the new LIDAR offered at SparkFun from PulsedLight, which, according to this YouTube video, is linked to DragonInnovation.com, another Petis investment.
The term for this is soft despotism.
It was coined by Alexis de Tocqueville and first described by him in the second volume of De la démocratie en Amérique, first published in 1840.
Actually, what really reduced crime was legalized abortion.
From "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, appearing in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.
There is a great interview with Elon Musk on youtube here. He is remarkably transparent about his reasoning. One key to his success is that he works very hard to understand motive and purpose when making decisions.
Musk makes that point that it costs about as much to fuel a rocket as it does to fuel a 747. Space launches are mostly so expensive because the vehicle is sacrificed with each launch, not because of the energy requirements for a space launch. The other big component of the expense is that rocket manufacturers charge a lot. According to Musk the value of the raw materials from which they are formed is reasonably inexpensive. Those were two hugely important realizations because they meant that space launches were not inherently expensive and therefore there is enormous potential for reducing launch costs.
By being Space X instead of Boeing the cost of launch is reduced to about 25% of conventional launches because Space X can assemble a rocket from raw materials for that much less. A re-usable vehicle, Musk predicts, would reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude.
So those are the motives and reasoning underlying the X-wing grid fins and re-entry discussed in the Slashdot summary.
I am not disputing that that is the best correlated variable, but in my experience it is not the lack of technical competence per se which causes problems with bad bosses but instead the concomitant pathologists exhibited by low-skill bosses to compensate for their own incompetence.
I have a story which illustrates the point: Earlier in my career I worked for a state government. One day I get to work and the lead programmer is having something of a breakdown in front of the project manager and they both happen to be standing in front of the entrance to my cubicle. So all I could do was wait there and listen. Turns out that the lead programmer had been devoting all of her time, and struggling for months, to find any way to digest and print the document files previously used in the old oracle/COBOL/dumb terminal system in our new custom client software running on OS X and which was replacing the dumb terminals. So I stand there and listen to the irate complaints from the lead programmer about how the problem was impossible to solve. At the end of the conversation I ask if she would like me to take a look at it. I was done by about 2:00pm the same day. It was easy. I just asked the DB programmer in the cubicle next to me for a sample of a document file. Looks like gibberish so I figure it's not PostScript and therefore must by PCL. Download and install the free GhostPCL renderer, an offshoot of the GhostScript project. Built and installed it. Wrapped the command-line GhostScript in Cocoa's NSTask. Threw together a GUI in interface builder. Wrote a little glue code in Objective-C to invoke Cocoa native classes for loading and displaying the output of GhostPCL and to invoke my NSTask GhostPCL wrapper. And checked the GhostPCL license, which I think might have been GPL, but since I was running it as a separate process and not modifying the source, or redistributing it outside of or organization, we were not compelled to share our custom OS X client source.
Worked great. Everyone was happy. Except the lead programmer, who was livid and from then on set about trying to make my life hell. She banned the project manager from speaking to me. She excluded me from meetings.
The fundamental problem was that the lead programmer did not know how to code. That is not a criticism of her programming skill, I mean she really did not know how to code. As in, literally, could not have programmed a single line to save her life. (Although I can not think of an actual circumstance where anyone would have to do that.) She did not understand what a pointer is. Did not now how to check code out of the repository. Would not have done any good if she had because she did not know how to build code. (In XCode. You click the build button.) Being technically incompetent, she was completely preoccupied with compensating for her own lack of skill, and it was that, not the lack of skill itself, which caused the problems.
The noted gun rights advocate John Lott, Jr. makes a point here.
So my father grew up on a dairy farm near Frederick, Maryland in the 1940's. After the Columbine massacre I commented that that kind of thing, students shooting each other in school, seemed new and wondered what gave rise to it. He said he did not know, but that when he was in grade school, the boys brought rifles to school so that they could hunt squirrels on the walk home. There was never a problem.
Some time later I ran into ESR somewhere or other, up on his gun rights hobby horse. I mentioned the thing about the squirrels. His only comment was, "that's a healthy gun culture."
I grew up in rural Ohio where hunting was an excusable absence from school. Many of my classmates owned guns. There were never any problems with threats or gun violence.
Children own guns. And that has been going on for a while. The student massacre thing is new. Which suggests that the underlying cause of these student-on-student gun massacres is not caused by the introduction of guns.
Tax avoidance schemes are remarkably common among large successful coporations. Other successful U.S. tech companies exploit the "Double Irish With a Dutch Sandwich" loophole. Ikea pays almost no tax by incorporating in Holland and exploiting its permissive rules for non-profits.
Which raises two questions:
- Are tax rates so high that it is necessary to engage in complicated tax avoidance schemes in western democracies to be successful in business?
- Is it best that companies do avoid taxes? Do we trust Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates to invest efficiently for the betterment of society more than we trust Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? And I would ask the same of the Republican counterparts of those politicians. Though that the comparison is somewhat unfair to Republican politicians because it is their objective to reduce the concentration of wealth under their own control by shrinking government, regardless of the political persuasions of those who would benefit from that dispersal of wealth. I have never understood why, for those who believe wealth is dirty, that its transfer to the political class is somehow purifying.
Another leading theory which explains this delay is Snowball Earth, a super ice age enveloping the entire surface of the planet.