Remember, the decline of the number of union workers in the US exactly tracks the decline of real income of American workers, which has been inexorable since the election of Ronald Reagan
US total real compensation per hour (the total of wages and benefits, such as health coverage, life insurance, and 401(k) plans) has been rising monotonically since at least 1950, with the notable exception of a plateau between 1992 and 1997. Graph here.
Moreover, US real median family income rose during the Reagan era (1981-1989) from $40K to $45K (2006 dollars). After Reagan, real median family income fell a bit but then went back up to nearly $50K in 1999. Data on Wikipedia.
The premature terminator mutation crept in, not because it was an evolutionary advantage, but because it was not an evolutionary disadvantage any more."
It takes energy to transcribe DNA into a protein. Thus, once the evolutionary pressure that caused the evolution of the protein expression was gone, it was an evolutionary loss to make a useless protein.
Alright, now we just need 3d compatible TVs being sold. You know those 120 Hz "truemotion" TVs you see everywhere? They don't accept 120 Hz input, only 60Hz, so they don't support 3D shutter glasses.
There is a mechanism called "quincunx" or "checkerboard" which you can think of as a single frame with the "black squares" for the left eye and the "white squares" the right eye. So input video comes in at a "normal" frame rate, but only half the pixels are sent to each eye during a normal frame period.
This came out of the DLP world, which naturally paints "two fields" per frame in a checkerboard pattern so they can use a half-resolution DLP chip, and has been adopted by LCD makers as well to solve the input frame rate problem over HDMI. Of course, it cuts your 3D resolution in half.
We do expect a future 120 Hz HDMI standard, but that is down the road.
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
But isn't it true that you can't simply throttle a nuclear fission plant up and down because of the creation of core poisons and associated instability? (Why you have to totally shut down a nuclear fission plant for days in case of a large blackout, while the chemical plants just throttle back)
Oh no, another smug armchair nuclear idiot that thinks we are still living in the 1970s before the French put in the work that showed fast breeders are a very expensive and difficult dead end.
Breeders never made much economic sense because not enough fission reactors were built worldwide to make the price of uranium rise (it actually declined in price for many years).
Someday, the price of uranium will rise, and breeders (typical or Thorium) will return.
Remember when our last President thought it would be a great idea to replace Social Security with individual investment accounts?
And you are really expecting to be paid the same amount of Social Security benefits which people are getting now? Already the government has backed down on cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, has begun to tax benefits, and no doubt will be pushing the Social Security retirement age higher soon (reducing total return).
NYSE returns are still about 1000% over the last 20 years, not counting dividends, despite the last 10 years of challenge.
"Perl is a fine first language, very accessible in the early going and very powerful as your skills increase."
Are you on drugs? There are 10,000 ways to write a line of Perl, with a million special elements that exist only in Perl, and is often write-only. It is a great language for experienced programmers to quickly write powerful scripts.
I concur with VB as a good first language. It is easy to write (so not to turn young programmers off with insanely difficult syntax), and gives a bit of exposure to both procedural and object-oriented programming.
Python would be my second choice, although I think it could use a bit of "cleaning up" before being a great first language.
Java would be great, if someone would dramatically simplify the class library. Beginners don't need 50 ways of accessing the same object. Frankly, experienced programmers probably don't either for 99% of what they do.
In truth, C is an important language to learn because it exposes the lower-level issues of programming. Not as a first language, but a second. People write things that have to work in real-time in C.
I had a semester of Scheme, which was worthless to me. It is like a magic trick, yes I'm very glad you can do normal things in a weirdly obscure way, but I'd prefer readable, understandable operations.
Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government.
Of course, if you don't cut a deal with the governments, they will simply take the computers for themselves when they come into the country, or put a big tariff on them (to "protect our native industries").
Poor people are poor because they are under bad government, not because they can't get laptops...
Why are people under bad government (low level of private property protection, high level of corruption, government ownership of major industries or farmlarnd)? That is the true research question we should be asking.
The proposed regulation states "Amend Title 10, Chapter 5, Subchapter 4.7, Section 2632.5 to read as follows: Sec. 2632.5 Rating Factors (a) Every insurer offering or issuing a policy of automobile insurance shall establish a class plan for the calculation of rates that specifies rating factors in accordance with this section and which complies with the good driver discount requirements of California Insurance Code Section 1861.02 and all other statutes providing discounts in automobile insurance rates and premiums."
Why the heck is the state micro-managing this? For that matter, why does the state mandate "good driver discounts"?
The state should perhaps set the mandatory minimum level of insurance per driver to drive on the public roads, and then leave it to the insurance marketplace to figure out how best to parcel out the risks (flat rate, GPS, good driver discounts, etc.)
This kind of state regulation and mandates is why health insurance costs so much!
A monopoly is not just the lack of substitute (or competing) goods - it's about the lack of viable competing goods.
In the US, under the Sherman Act, an illegal monopoly is:"(1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident."
Jurisprudence has drawn a distinction between coercive and innocent monopoly - that the Sherman Act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct.
I've often heard that most suicide bombers tend to be fairly educated.
My theory is that better educated suicide bombers are in countries where they have a tough time getting a job, and don't want to drive a cab with an engineering degree. Might just drive them bats.
Worldwide known reserves of Cadmium are about 490,000 metric tons, and production is about 20,000 metric tons/yr. Cadmium is generally recovered as a byproduct from zinc concentrates. Zinc-to-cadmium ratios in typical zinc ores range from 200:1 to 400:1. Estimated world identified resources of cadmium were about 6 million tons, based on identified zinc resources of 1.9 billion tons containing about 0.3% cadmium. The average annual New York dealer price of cadmium metal in 2007 was $7.61 per kilogram ($3.45 per pound).
The source of the silicon is silica in various natural forms, such as quartzite. Silicon is the second most abundant element (after oxygen) in the crust, making up 25.7% of the crust by mass. Word production of silicon is about 5.7 million metric tons/yr. The price for silicon ranges from $0.66 per pound for 75% ferrosilicon and $1.13 per pound for silicon metal.
Here are the UDP-based file transfer systems that I prefer:
Kencast has been the leader in multicast IP satellite file transfer (where all kinds of weird things can happen in Ku band), now they have a system called BlazeBand built for point-to-point IP connections that used their FAZZT Forward Error Correction technology, validation algorithm, and missed packet collector algorithms. I've used FAZZT over satellite, but haven't tried BlazeBand yet.
Aspera is also widely used as a point-to-point UDP file transfer system in the entertainment industry. I've seen it used to move large video files for network television programming.
OK, so to develop for the iPhone I have to 1) learn a new version of C and 2) deal with yet another overly complex set of classes, invented to make your life more difficult.
Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple. They hate markets and they hate property rights.
Not really. The track record of carbon caps in Europe is that they create tremendous corruption and are ineffective. This bill already has "regulatory capture" by industries that lobbied enough to get "free emissions", while others will have to purchase them from those specific politically-connected industries.
If you really want effective reduction in an externality that is difficult to measure (and the hundreds of millions of point emissions of CO2 are tough to measure), a Pigouvian Tax on the fuel based on its carbon emissions is the best way to balance CO2 reduction with a low chance for corruption.
Economically, a non-corrupt cap & trade system is fairly equivalent to a Pigouvian Tax. However there has been no such thing as a non-corrupt CO2 cap & trade system.
Many economists, including those who are very pro-capitalist (such as Gary Becker, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Greg Mankiw), have created the Pigou Club to support the concept of Pigouvian externality taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
Remember, the decline of the number of union workers in the US exactly tracks the decline of real income of American workers, which has been inexorable since the election of Ronald Reagan
US total real compensation per hour (the total of wages and benefits, such as health coverage, life insurance, and 401(k) plans) has been rising monotonically since at least 1950, with the notable exception of a plateau between 1992 and 1997. Graph here.
Moreover, US real median family income rose during the Reagan era (1981-1989) from $40K to $45K (2006 dollars). After Reagan, real median family income fell a bit but then went back up to nearly $50K in 1999. Data on Wikipedia.
In 2007, US real median household income was $50,233 in (2007 dollars.)
The premature terminator mutation crept in, not because it was an evolutionary advantage, but because it was not an evolutionary disadvantage any more."
It takes energy to transcribe DNA into a protein. Thus, once the evolutionary pressure that caused the evolution of the protein expression was gone, it was an evolutionary loss to make a useless protein.
Alright, now we just need 3d compatible TVs being sold. You know those 120 Hz "truemotion" TVs you see everywhere? They don't accept 120 Hz input, only 60Hz, so they don't support 3D shutter glasses.
There is a mechanism called "quincunx" or "checkerboard" which you can think of as a single frame with the "black squares" for the left eye and the "white squares" the right eye. So input video comes in at a "normal" frame rate, but only half the pixels are sent to each eye during a normal frame period.
This came out of the DLP world, which naturally paints "two fields" per frame in a checkerboard pattern so they can use a half-resolution DLP chip, and has been adopted by LCD makers as well to solve the input frame rate problem over HDMI. Of course, it cuts your 3D resolution in half.
We do expect a future 120 Hz HDMI standard, but that is down the road.
modern 3D just doesn't seem to compare with the old red/blue 3D I grew up seeing in theme parks.
Perhaps your interocular distance has increased since you were a child, but the left/right disparity of stereoscopic movies has remained the same ;)
The coal plants also didn't operate at 100% all the time. They altered their power output increasing output during peak demand during the day and late evening and decreasing output as demand dropped during late night and early morning.
But isn't it true that you can't simply throttle a nuclear fission plant up and down because of the creation of core poisons and associated instability? (Why you have to totally shut down a nuclear fission plant for days in case of a large blackout, while the chemical plants just throttle back)
Oh no, another smug armchair nuclear idiot that thinks we are still living in the 1970s before the French put in the work that showed fast breeders are a very expensive and difficult dead end.
Breeders never made much economic sense because not enough fission reactors were built worldwide to make the price of uranium rise (it actually declined in price for many years).
Someday, the price of uranium will rise, and breeders (typical or Thorium) will return.
Bite the bullet. pay a little more for power now, and poison our children, their children, their children times 100, a little less. kthx
You should consider not letting you kids play inside Yucca Mountain, Centre de la Manche, or Centre de l'Aube!
Unfortunately you omitted to mention that it still produces a waste that is beyond lethal for 25,000 years.
But not that much. All the high-level nuclear waste ever produced would barely cover up a football field.
On the other hand, we have a global CO2 problem...
Remember when our last President thought it would be a great idea to replace Social Security with individual investment accounts?
And you are really expecting to be paid the same amount of Social Security benefits which people are getting now? Already the government has backed down on cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security, has begun to tax benefits, and no doubt will be pushing the Social Security retirement age higher soon (reducing total return).
NYSE returns are still about 1000% over the last 20 years, not counting dividends, despite the last 10 years of challenge.
Capitalism in the hands of both idiots and very smart people can be deadly. So, why are we using it again?l
Because Socialism is even more deadly. Mr. Mao took out 30 million, for example.
Much like democracy, which often sucks, it is still better than dictatorship.
"Perl is a fine first language, very accessible in the early going and very powerful as your skills increase."
Are you on drugs? There are 10,000 ways to write a line of Perl, with a million special elements that exist only in Perl, and is often write-only. It is a great language for experienced programmers to quickly write powerful scripts.
I concur with VB as a good first language. It is easy to write (so not to turn young programmers off with insanely difficult syntax), and gives a bit of exposure to both procedural and object-oriented programming.
Python would be my second choice, although I think it could use a bit of "cleaning up" before being a great first language.
Java would be great, if someone would dramatically simplify the class library. Beginners don't need 50 ways of accessing the same object. Frankly, experienced programmers probably don't either for 99% of what they do.
In truth, C is an important language to learn because it exposes the lower-level issues of programming. Not as a first language, but a second. People write things that have to work in real-time in C.
I had a semester of Scheme, which was worthless to me. It is like a magic trick, yes I'm very glad you can do normal things in a weirdly obscure way, but I'd prefer readable, understandable operations.
Their big idea was to sell this thing to the governments of third world countries, despite the fact that most third world countries are led by corrupt governments that have little money, and use what money they do have to grease the palms of the inner circle of the government.
Of course, if you don't cut a deal with the governments, they will simply take the computers for themselves when they come into the country, or put a big tariff on them (to "protect our native industries").
Poor people are poor because they are under bad government, not because they can't get laptops...
Why are people under bad government (low level of private property protection, high level of corruption, government ownership of major industries or farmlarnd)? That is the true research question we should be asking.
Can anybody clarify for me?
It is all very clear, just Amend Title 10, California Code of Regulations, Chapter 5, Subchapter 4.7, Section 2632.5 to read as follows.
(Will someone mod this funny?)
The proposed regulation states "Amend Title 10, Chapter 5, Subchapter 4.7, Section 2632.5 to read as follows:
Sec. 2632.5 Rating Factors
(a) Every insurer offering or issuing a policy of automobile insurance shall establish a class
plan for the calculation of rates that specifies rating factors in accordance with this section and
which complies with the good driver discount requirements of California Insurance Code Section
1861.02 and all other statutes providing discounts in automobile insurance rates and premiums."
Why the heck is the state micro-managing this? For that matter, why does the state mandate "good driver discounts"?
The state should perhaps set the mandatory minimum level of insurance per driver to drive on the public roads, and then leave it to the insurance marketplace to figure out how best to parcel out the risks (flat rate, GPS, good driver discounts, etc.)
This kind of state regulation and mandates is why health insurance costs so much!
A monopoly is not just the lack of substitute (or competing) goods - it's about the lack of viable competing goods.
In the US, under the Sherman Act, an illegal monopoly is :"(1) the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market and (2) the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident."
Jurisprudence has drawn a distinction between coercive and innocent monopoly - that the Sherman Act is not meant to punish businesses that come to dominate their market passively or on their own merit, only those that intentionally dominate the market through misconduct.
it would greatly facilitate lesbian genertic reproduction of two women, vs. one woman and a sperm donor.
Or of one woman with herself (though at greater risk of genetic disease).
uranium is a limited resource
Thorium is very abundant, and can be the basis of a long-term viable nuclear fission fuel cycle.
I've often heard that most suicide bombers tend to be fairly educated.
My theory is that better educated suicide bombers are in countries where they have a tough time getting a job, and don't want to drive a cab with an engineering degree. Might just drive them bats.
How plentiful is cadmium relative to silicon?
Worldwide known reserves of Cadmium are about 490,000 metric tons, and production is about 20,000 metric tons/yr. Cadmium is generally recovered as a byproduct from zinc concentrates. Zinc-to-cadmium ratios in typical zinc ores range from 200:1 to 400:1. Estimated world identified resources of cadmium were about 6 million tons, based on identified zinc resources of 1.9 billion tons containing about 0.3% cadmium. The average annual New York dealer price of cadmium metal in 2007 was $7.61 per kilogram ($3.45 per pound).
The source of the silicon is silica in various natural forms, such as quartzite. Silicon is the second most abundant element (after oxygen) in the crust, making up 25.7% of the crust by mass. Word production of silicon is about 5.7 million metric tons/yr. The price for silicon ranges from $0.66 per pound for 75% ferrosilicon and $1.13 per pound for silicon metal.
The Ford Model T was introduced at $850 in 1908, about $20,000 in 2008 inflation-adjusted dollars.
Here are the UDP-based file transfer systems that I prefer:
Kencast has been the leader in multicast IP satellite file transfer (where all kinds of weird things can happen in Ku band), now they have a system called BlazeBand built for point-to-point IP connections that used their FAZZT Forward Error Correction technology, validation algorithm, and missed packet collector algorithms. I've used FAZZT over satellite, but haven't tried BlazeBand yet.
Aspera is also widely used as a point-to-point UDP file transfer system in the entertainment industry. I've seen it used to move large video files for network television programming.
OK, so to develop for the iPhone I have to 1) learn a new version of C and 2) deal with yet another overly complex set of classes, invented to make your life more difficult.
Where is the "Visual Basic" for iPhone?
The minimum wage in American Samoa used to be less than the standard Federal rate, but that is changing now.
On the other hand, the recent recovery bill allows American Samoa tuna canners special tax breaks.
Opponents of this bill hate capitalism, pure and simple. They hate markets and they hate property rights.
Not really. The track record of carbon caps in Europe is that they create tremendous corruption and are ineffective. This bill already has "regulatory capture" by industries that lobbied enough to get "free emissions", while others will have to purchase them from those specific politically-connected industries.
If you really want effective reduction in an externality that is difficult to measure (and the hundreds of millions of point emissions of CO2 are tough to measure), a Pigouvian Tax on the fuel based on its carbon emissions is the best way to balance CO2 reduction with a low chance for corruption.
Economically, a non-corrupt cap & trade system is fairly equivalent to a Pigouvian Tax. However there has been no such thing as a non-corrupt CO2 cap & trade system.
Many economists, including those who are very pro-capitalist (such as Gary Becker, Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, and Greg Mankiw), have created the Pigou Club to support the concept of Pigouvian externality taxes.
Lots of gangs, crime, poverty, racial tension, and other problems in LA
Well, of course I'm not talking about the area south of Pico or east of La Brea ;)