The big problem is all the other Amazon "special sauce" that blew up when US-EAST-1 S3 went down, which means Amazon has not adequately made their own services reliable with multi-AZ/multi-region resiliency.
Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.
So Echo/Alexa was down because it depends on Lambda, new subscriptions to AMI software, Simple Email Service, etc.
It's bad enough the school is doing this to their staff, but the school is ALSO charging students for curriculum which will prepare them to work the very same sort of jobs the school just outsourced.
There is a big difference between IT Staff who are CompTIA A+ versus USC computer science majors who will be getting programming jobs at Google.
U.S. jobless claims near 44-year low, and "A survey from the Fed on Wednesday showed the labor market remained tight in early 2017, with some of the central bank's districts reporting "widening" labor shortages."
I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants
Apple doesn't own iPhone assembly plants either...
Many business models are possible. For example, Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. manufactures Hyundai and Mercedes-branded autos for sale on the Chinese market.
As a liberal who knows a thing or two about the guts of ISPs I had many arguments about the wisdom of many "Net Neutrality" proposals with my friends. Some of the requirements people wanted amounted to being expected to fill out your tax forms while riding a unicycle along a tight rope.
Of course, the entire concept is bull. The (non-government) Internet developed under freedom of companies to freely decide to interconnect according to their business needs. Often one ISP rejected another until a mutually-agreeable solution could be worked out. Some ISPs could peer with others, some had to pay.
Any of the "OMG not neutral!" stuff I hear about today is about someone making big money from pushing Tbps of content into someone else's network and expecting that company to pay for all of it. It takes two to tango.
And while there may come a day when some end-user ISP is dumb enough to actually try to provide less-than-Internet to their subscribers, to date it hasn't really happened (sorry pirates), even in situations where the ISP is granted a local monopoly (which, of course, is the real lack of Internet freedom).
You understand that Brazil is in the top 10 economies right?
Italyâ(TM)s $1.8 trillion economy is the worldâ(TM)s eighth largest in terms of nominal GDP (and larger than Brazil's). But I wouldn't call it "vibrant"...
Regarding "The country's IT industry is booming in Brazil -- still Latin America's most vibrant economy", I think one can make a better case for Chile.
Brazil's 5-year compound annual growth is 1%, and last year GDP growth was -3.8%. Brazil GDP per capita is $15,615, most recent unemployment was 12%, and inflation is 9%.
Chile's 5-year CAGR is 3.9%, and last year GDP growth was 2.1%. Chile GDP per capita is $23,460, with unemployment 6.8%, and inflation 4.3%.
IT outsourcing is more mature in Brazil than Chile, and Brazil's overall GDP is six times larger than Chile's, yes. But is Brazil's economy really "vibrant"?
Uh, 5% unemployment at historically-high labor force participation rates? We're not at peak, but we're above the 59% historical labor force maximum participation rate.
See US Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate which is currently 62.9%, down from a peak of just over 67% 1998-2000, now back to a level reached in mid-1977. It has been flatlined for about 2 years.
But yes, the labor force participation rate is higher than when women worked in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant...
You might be thinking of the Civilian Employment-Population Ratio which is at 59.9%, a level equivalent to Dec. 1984. It has been rising since July, 2011.
Over the last 10 years, the following costs are up: food, health care, child care, vehicle maintenance, and college is way up. On the other hand these prices have fallen slightly: housing, personal care, clothing, cell phone service, and these are much less expensive: toys, computers, televisions.
Unemployment was 0.1% higher in January 2017 than December 2016--no surprise, there's always that slump.
If he really wanted to improve US transportation he'd invest in some 200+mph railways that europe and japan have had for decades which have pretty much killed off a lot of short distance air routes.
It is a far longer drive from LA Union Station to SpaceX than LAX to SpaceX...
We have multiple vacant homes for every homeless man, woman, and child in this country, as a result of the mortgage scam bailout.
Most recent data on US home vacancy rates is 1.8% in 2015, down from a max of 2.8% in 2008. Current home vacancy rates are no different than they were in say 1989 or 2001. Thus, I suspect that your theory on mortgage bailouts is probably not correct.
That said, your numbers are right - average nightly homelessness in the US is about 500,000, whereas there are probably 2.2 million vacant homes. 1.56 million people are homeless at some point in a year.
But yes, I am sure there are some places like Detroit where you can't even give away a house. But we don't have enough housing built where people can have high-productivity jobs.
A 10 foot prop makes over ten times as much thrust as a 3 foot prop, so having four props of 3 feet each is very inefficient compared to a single 10 foot prop.
But I bet that quadcopters have less blade-vortex interaction interaction noise, or at least it is at a less annoying frequency than "whop whop".
Or, you know, don't live in cities. Many of us don't like them...Why is a city the only answer?
I don't think there is any reason to force people to live in cities. Everyone has a different set of trade-offs, that is what the free market is all about.
However there also is no reason to have high levels of housing construction regulation to artificially reduce city populations. And these regulations specifically damage the overall economy.
Regarding cities, three quarters of aggregate U.S. growth between 1964 and 2009 was due to growth in second-tier cities (such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC).
Labor productivity and labor demand actually grew most rapidly in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose thanks to a concentration of human capital intensive industries like high tech and finance. However, these cities were not able to best turn that productivity into high levels of economic growth because tight housing supply constraints effectively limited employment growth in these cities.
Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years
True, but inflation was higher (inflating away the principle cost to the borrower) and also real home prices were rising faster (keeping borrowers from being underwater, thus always having a re-fi or selling option).
Did you vote for a politician who promised to lower regulatory barriers to home building? I'm sure the Libertarian Party of Orange County would welcome you, because I can assure you that Democrats and Republicans there are both against any new home building.
Increase supply of housing Dialogue with developers and UCI to better understand barriers to building housing that they have experienced Ensure efficiency in the permitting process Be mindful that developers will pass on fees incurred during permit process to renters or buyers Remove legal or zoning barriers to affordable, sustainable microhousing and tiny houses Support zoning more high-density areas to allow modern solutions for living spaces for single professionals and students, such as micro-apartments and studios Deregulate duplexes - for example, why can't property owners determine for themselves how much floor space to devote to a second unit? "The floor area of a second unit shall not exceed 30 percent of the floor area of the existing living area" (Zoning Ch. 3-26-3). Encourage dialogue about innovative housing practices like co-housing and cooperatives Orange County in general has a massive housing shortage (estimates vary; 40,000 to 100,000 more units may be needed countywide). Irvine is one of the cities with highest demand.
The BIGGEST problem in the US is the over-regulation of residential building in the most productive cities that keeps the housing supply artificially low.
In the study "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth", the authors show that lowering regulatory constraints on housing in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%. That is three or more years of current economic growth rates "for free".
Increasing density in these cities is simple. For example, see these reasonable designs for enhanced density while maintaining green space and livability. You don't have to be like Toronto with 37 residential towers over 46 stories. You can achieve a density of 100,000 people per square mile using a mix of buildings up to 8 stories tall.
To see how screwed-up things have become, 40% of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today, because of height, too many residential units, or too much mixed-use between residential and commercial.
More people living in the most productive cities will also increase the tax bases there, allowing for more investment in transport, education, etc. However transport needs would decline (or at least stay the same) if most new residents live inside these cities instead of the distant exurbs.
Humanity has basically no experience with radiation levels this high.
There are higher radiation levels inside an operating reactor. And humanity deals with spent fuel pools with similar level of radioactivity all the time. The difference is that those situations have the spent fuel sealed inside fuel rods and safely shielded by lots of water rather than spread out across the floor, in the air, etc.
How is it that the scalpers can predict demand, but Ticketmaster cannot?
They don't - scalpers are making a bet - the sometimes lose. This is the situations for many "distributors" in different retail industries, where wholesalers give up some profit to retailers in exchange for reduced risk.
With Ticketmaster, prices almost immediately doubled - and have continued to rise at a rate significantly higher than inflation could ever explain,
Ticketmaster pays venues lock-in fees to reduce their risks. The extra money for tickets due to the introduction of Ticketmaster means more venues are able to survive.
The recent run-up in ticket prices, however, is all about Internet music piracy. Big artists can not make much money from recordings due to piracy, so instead they make money from touring.
Slashdot Mirror
The big problem is not the US-EAST-1 S3 outage.
The big problem is all the other Amazon "special sauce" that blew up when US-EAST-1 S3 went down, which means Amazon has not adequately made their own services reliable with multi-AZ/multi-region resiliency.
Other AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region that rely on S3 for storage, including the S3 console, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) new instance launches, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes (when data was needed from a S3 snapshot), and AWS Lambda were also impacted while the S3 APIs were unavailable.
So Echo/Alexa was down because it depends on Lambda, new subscriptions to AMI software, Simple Email Service, etc.
The cost of housing.
And the high cost of housing in US major cities is due to over-regulation of the housing building sector.
It's bad enough the school is doing this to their staff, but the school is ALSO charging students for curriculum which will prepare them to work the very same sort of jobs the school just outsourced.
There is a big difference between IT Staff who are CompTIA A+ versus USC computer science majors who will be getting programming jobs at Google.
U.S. jobless claims near 44-year low, and "A survey from the Fed on Wednesday showed the labor market remained tight in early 2017, with some of the central bank's districts reporting "widening" labor shortages."
Indeed, see the MP3 spectral analysis here.
I didn't see Apple ever ramping up the building of assembly plants
Apple doesn't own iPhone assembly plants either...
Many business models are possible. For example, Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Co. manufactures Hyundai and Mercedes-branded autos for sale on the Chinese market.
Disney just reported net income last quarter of $2.88 billion on revenues of $15.24 billion...
CEO Robert Iger: "Driven by the phenomenal success of Star Wars, we delivered the highest quarterly earnings in the history of our company"
As a liberal who knows a thing or two about the guts of ISPs I had many arguments about the wisdom of many "Net Neutrality" proposals with my friends. Some of the requirements people wanted amounted to being expected to fill out your tax forms while riding a unicycle along a tight rope.
Of course, the entire concept is bull. The (non-government) Internet developed under freedom of companies to freely decide to interconnect according to their business needs. Often one ISP rejected another until a mutually-agreeable solution could be worked out. Some ISPs could peer with others, some had to pay.
Any of the "OMG not neutral!" stuff I hear about today is about someone making big money from pushing Tbps of content into someone else's network and expecting that company to pay for all of it. It takes two to tango.
And while there may come a day when some end-user ISP is dumb enough to actually try to provide less-than-Internet to their subscribers, to date it hasn't really happened (sorry pirates), even in situations where the ISP is granted a local monopoly (which, of course, is the real lack of Internet freedom).
You understand that Brazil is in the top 10 economies right?
Italyâ(TM)s $1.8 trillion economy is the worldâ(TM)s eighth largest in terms of nominal GDP (and larger than Brazil's). But I wouldn't call it "vibrant"...
because you'll never have much in the way of networking opportunities.
Yes but you often get a job from someone you know in another company, rather than the one you are in...
Regarding "The country's IT industry is booming in Brazil -- still Latin America's most vibrant economy", I think one can make a better case for Chile.
Brazil's 5-year compound annual growth is 1%, and last year GDP growth was -3.8%. Brazil GDP per capita is $15,615, most recent unemployment was 12%, and inflation is 9%.
Chile's 5-year CAGR is 3.9%, and last year GDP growth was 2.1%. Chile GDP per capita is $23,460, with unemployment 6.8%, and inflation 4.3%.
IT outsourcing is more mature in Brazil than Chile, and Brazil's overall GDP is six times larger than Chile's, yes. But is Brazil's economy really "vibrant"?
[This entire post regards the United States]
Uh, 5% unemployment at historically-high labor force participation rates? We're not at peak, but we're above the 59% historical labor force maximum participation rate.
See US Civilian Labor Force Participation Rate which is currently 62.9%, down from a peak of just over 67% 1998-2000, now back to a level reached in mid-1977. It has been flatlined for about 2 years.
But yes, the labor force participation rate is higher than when women worked in the kitchen barefoot & pregnant...
You might be thinking of the Civilian Employment-Population Ratio which is at 59.9%, a level equivalent to Dec. 1984. It has been rising since July, 2011.
Regarding wages, Average Hourly Earnings of Production and Nonsupervisory Employees: Total Private is currently at an all-time high, $21.84/hour.
If you'd like to adjust for hours worked and inflation, and look at a median instead of an average, Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over is also at an all-time high of $348 1982-84 CPI Adjusted Dollars, but frankly that isn't too much higher than $335 in 1979, but above the lowest point of $309 in 1981.
Over the last 10 years, the following costs are up: food, health care, child care, vehicle maintenance, and college is way up. On the other hand these prices have fallen slightly: housing, personal care, clothing, cell phone service, and these are much less expensive: toys, computers, televisions.
Unemployment was 0.1% higher in January 2017 than December 2016--no surprise, there's always that slump.
At least the total number of jobs has been increasing since March, 2010.
If he really wanted to improve US transportation he'd invest in some 200+mph railways that europe and japan have had for decades which have pretty much killed off a lot of short distance air routes.
It is a far longer drive from LA Union Station to SpaceX than LAX to SpaceX...
Indeed, here is video of three employees walking in the crosswalk being hit by a car.
We have multiple vacant homes for every homeless man, woman, and child in this country, as a result of the mortgage scam bailout.
Most recent data on US home vacancy rates is 1.8% in 2015, down from a max of 2.8% in 2008. Current home vacancy rates are no different than they were in say 1989 or 2001. Thus, I suspect that your theory on mortgage bailouts is probably not correct.
That said, your numbers are right - average nightly homelessness in the US is about 500,000, whereas there are probably 2.2 million vacant homes. 1.56 million people are homeless at some point in a year.
Purchase Only House Price Index for the United States is at an all time high now, after recovering from a bottom in 2011, suggesting little slack in the housing market.
But yes, I am sure there are some places like Detroit where you can't even give away a house. But we don't have enough housing built where people can have high-productivity jobs.
A 10 foot prop makes over ten times as much thrust as a 3 foot prop, so having four props of 3 feet each is very inefficient compared to a single 10 foot prop.
But I bet that quadcopters have less blade-vortex interaction interaction noise, or at least it is at a less annoying frequency than "whop whop".
Or, you know, don't live in cities. Many of us don't like them...Why is a city the only answer?
I don't think there is any reason to force people to live in cities. Everyone has a different set of trade-offs, that is what the free market is all about.
However there also is no reason to have high levels of housing construction regulation to artificially reduce city populations. And these regulations specifically damage the overall economy.
Regarding cities, three quarters of aggregate U.S. growth between 1964 and 2009 was due to growth in second-tier cities (such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Washington DC).
Labor productivity and labor demand actually grew most rapidly in New York, San Francisco, and San Jose thanks to a concentration of human capital intensive industries like high tech and finance. However, these cities were not able to best turn that productivity into high levels of economic growth because tight housing supply constraints effectively limited employment growth in these cities.
Then why has Paul McCartney made $15 million in royalties for "Wonderful Christmastime"?
Mortgage interest rates are the lowest they've been in 60 years
True, but inflation was higher (inflating away the principle cost to the borrower) and also real home prices were rising faster (keeping borrowers from being underwater, thus always having a re-fi or selling option).
And there still isn't any inventory to buy.
Did you vote for a politician who promised to lower regulatory barriers to home building? I'm sure the Libertarian Party of Orange County would welcome you, because I can assure you that Democrats and Republicans there are both against any new home building.
Irvine City Council candidate Courtney Santos said:
Increase supply of housing
Dialogue with developers and UCI to better understand barriers to building housing that they have experienced
Ensure efficiency in the permitting process
Be mindful that developers will pass on fees incurred during permit process to renters or buyers
Remove legal or zoning barriers to affordable, sustainable microhousing and tiny houses
Support zoning more high-density areas to allow modern solutions for living spaces for single professionals and students, such as micro-apartments and studios
Deregulate duplexes - for example, why can't property owners determine for themselves how much floor space to devote to a second unit? "The floor area of a second unit shall not exceed 30 percent of the floor area of the existing living area" (Zoning Ch. 3-26-3).
Encourage dialogue about innovative housing practices like co-housing and cooperatives
Orange County in general has a massive housing shortage (estimates vary; 40,000 to 100,000 more units may be needed countywide). Irvine is one of the cities with highest demand.
The BIGGEST problem in the US is the over-regulation of residential building in the most productive cities that keeps the housing supply artificially low.
In the study "Why Do Cities Matter? Local Growth and Aggregate Growth", the authors show that lowering regulatory constraints on housing in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose to the level of the median city would expand their work force and increase U.S. GDP by 9.5%. That is three or more years of current economic growth rates "for free".
Increasing density in these cities is simple. For example, see these reasonable designs for enhanced density while maintaining green space and livability. You don't have to be like Toronto with 37 residential towers over 46 stories. You can achieve a density of 100,000 people per square mile using a mix of buildings up to 8 stories tall.
To see how screwed-up things have become, 40% of buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today, because of height, too many residential units, or too much mixed-use between residential and commercial.
More people living in the most productive cities will also increase the tax bases there, allowing for more investment in transport, education, etc. However transport needs would decline (or at least stay the same) if most new residents live inside these cities instead of the distant exurbs.
Humanity has basically no experience with radiation levels this high.
There are higher radiation levels inside an operating reactor. And humanity deals with spent fuel pools with similar level of radioactivity all the time. The difference is that those situations have the spent fuel sealed inside fuel rods and safely shielded by lots of water rather than spread out across the floor, in the air, etc.
Ticketmaster basically has a lock on tickets
The "lock" is guaranteed regular payments to venues. Anyone with enough capital could try to "buy out" the venues and compete with Ticketmaster.
How is it that the scalpers can predict demand, but Ticketmaster cannot?
They don't - scalpers are making a bet - the sometimes lose. This is the situations for many "distributors" in different retail industries, where wholesalers give up some profit to retailers in exchange for reduced risk.
With Ticketmaster, prices almost immediately doubled - and have continued to rise at a rate significantly higher than inflation could ever explain,
Ticketmaster pays venues lock-in fees to reduce their risks. The extra money for tickets due to the introduction of Ticketmaster means more venues are able to survive.
The recent run-up in ticket prices, however, is all about Internet music piracy. Big artists can not make much money from recordings due to piracy, so instead they make money from touring.