If you look at Edmund's analysis of the CARS program, Ford has 4 of the top 10 (including the higher margin F150 and escape SUV). The official government figures, however, are broken out so that high milage (and mostly foreign) cars look more popular.
Thanks. I can't think of a way to describe the government statistics as anything but "misleading". It really doesn't matter, though, whether the Focus or the Escape is at the top of the list, except for PR purposes. What does matter is the aggregate fuel economy improvement, which is not in dispute, and the economic stimulus multiplier factor (which is also not in dispute). By the measurements that matter, the program has been a surprising success.
The fundamental basis of Chicago economics (which we've been using for the past 40 years) is that people and thus businesses are rational actors and make decisions that are best for their own interests.
That's pernicious fucking bullshit. People and companies make irrational decisions all the time. Consider the EPA cleanup mess: according to the idea of rational expectations, the prospect of having to pay for an EPA cleanup would be a strong deterrent to polluting. In reality, nobody cares, because the person who decides whether to pollute will be gone by the time the consequences of a decision to pollute become apparent. Thus, the company as a whole makes a rather irrational decision to pollute regardless.
You need proactive enforcement to stop these kinds of violations. Generally, trying t stop a given behavior by threatening companies (or people) with consequences over a time horizon of a few years is completely ineffective in stopping that behavior.
Of course, I wouldn't mind a word in which specially crafted "virtual workers" did most of the work, assuming you can get the whole "three laws" bit working properly...
Once we create a self-aware AI that can use language, we won't think of it as a kind of livestock, but instead as a completely different kind of being. The only reason we consider it acceptable to yoke an ox to plow a field, or a horse to draw a cart, is that these animals aren't sentient. Putting a sentient AI to work for us would rightly be regarded as a form of slavery.
Two hearts? difficult to coordinate two hearts. Also, chances are that if damage is extreme enough to destroy the heart, chances are that a backup heart wouldn't significantly boost the chance of reproductive success after that point. (Heart disease is irrelevant as it occurs after reproductive age.)
Two brains? first of all, it'd be impossible to coordinate the actions of two brains. Second, the brain already has quite a bit of internal redundancy. Sufficiently young children with entire hemispheres removed can grow up normally. People who suffer multiple concussions can still switch in spare circuitry and return to normal capacity (at least until later in life.)
Two mouths? Where would you put the second one, and what structure would you develop into it? Evolution doesn't allow an organism to develop a structure wherever it would be convenient, but only to modify existing ones to suit a new purpose.
The kidney is a simple organ prone to infection and mounted in a vulnerable position in the body. I can definitely see how having a spare would increase the odds of reproductive success at minimum cost.
I've measured the frequency of organs are referenced in Shakespeare's complete works, including sonnets and other poems. The corpus I used was the World Library version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare available via Project Gutenberg. It doesn't mention whether these are folio or quarto versions, so the results are approximation. In each category, I included singular and plural forms as labeled below.
Absolutely. In a closed system such as the human body, an unhealthy spleen is indicative that it is the strongest organ in the body. Any manifestation of internal imbalance is routed to the organ with the best chance for survival.
Yep, and humors drain to the lowest point along equipotent Chi lines, facilitating the conservation of crystal energy according to Hubbard's Law.
See? Using big words doesn't suddenly transmute your idea from bullshit into science.
And you forget why we allow businesses to exist: to benefit society in the process of enriching the shareholders. It's a social contract, and lately, businesses have been abrogating their responsibility to the society that allows them to exist.
As a small business owner, I bet you vote for the party that does though. That's disgusting. I've had enough of this kind of moral calculus: the kind of treatment works here receive is outright illegal in Western Europe. Society there hasn't collapsed: in fact, they're better off for it. So screw your pro-business rhetoric. There comes a point when being anti-business is also anti-people, but we're nowhere near that point.
Anybody with real wealth has it invested in assets which protect against inflation.
Wicked lies. Bondholders lose out as inflation reduces the effective interest rate. Poor people don't have "assets" to speak of --- that's why they're poor. When wages keep pace with inflation, poor people at worst aren't affected.
While a European manager might earn 5x more than a regular worker, in the US 100x and more is not uncommon.
100? That's low. Try 1,000 in some industries. Have you fucking considering that that very fact is what's dragging the United States down into the abyss? In what fucking world is that wealth disparity acceptable?
Econ 101? Here's Econ 102: It's far better for ordinary people to live in an economy with full employment and moderate-high inflation than suffer higher unemployment via the IS-LM curve so that a few people with access to "capital" don't see it decline in value so quickly.
Let me say that again: inflation is a good thing so long as it's driven by wages.
That's why our economy in the United States took off like a rocket after World War II: sure, part of it was that everyone else was bombed out. But a larger factor was four years of sustained full employment at high wages had transferred quite a bit of wealth and created a robust middle that would only start to be systematically dismantled when Reagan took office.
Entitled? Motherfucking entitled!? Why yes, I am entitled to respect. If you'd lived 100 years ago, you'd have complained about the whiners who only wanted to work 40 hours a week, not 80, and hey, if you got black lung on a coal mine and died at 40, it's your fault. You'd have said that working in the textile mills gave kids more character. Fuck you. People like you make it impossible to restore in this country the balance between labor and capital. You're not a tycoon browsing Slashdot. Why do you insist on arguing against your own best interests and those of everyone you know?
So how do voltage and current leaks invalidate the universal mathematical principles of computer science? I'm beginning to get a whiff of anti-intellectualism here.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Data structures and algorithms don't suddenly work differently when they're synthesized from Verilog instead of compiled from C.
You don't make purchases with a card, but instead with the bank account the card represents. There are two parts to every transaction: identification and authorization. When using an ATM, the physical card provides both identification and authorization. The account number is simply placed on the card, and authentication comes from physical ownership of the card. (PINs don't count because they are unfortunately verified based on machine-readable information on the card itself.) Because it's non-trivial to both learn an account number and manufacture a matching card, physical possession of the card is a pretty good proxy for control of the account.
Online purchases are different: the identification still comes from the number printed on the card, but the authorization is based on the notion that account numbers are hard to guess (which is terrible security), or on a secret shared by the bank and the holder of the card, the CSC number on the back (which is merely bad security).
If you wanted, you could make online purchases work the same way they do today, and just keep printing CSC numbers on the back of cards. The ATM authorization scheme and the online one don't have anything to do with each other.
But if you're going to issue new cards, you might as well improve online security too, and stop using CSC numbers. Have customers just select a password for each account. Retailers would verify the password the same way they verify CSC numbers now, but because the password wouldn't be printed on the back of the card, stealing the physical card wouldn't give you the ability to make online purchases using that card.
Better still would be a way for the card to interact online with the bank, but that seems impractical to me.
All cards and card-readers include both the old and new solution.
It's all right for ATMs to be able to read old-style static tokens, but if new cards include both the token and the chip, then a compromised ATM can simply use the old-style authentication token to perform a fraudulent transaction. After all, aren't both schemes just as good from the banks point of view?
Now, if you guys have managed to phase out cards with offline, static tokens and rely solely on the chip, then kudos to you.
The fake-ATM problem is just a man in the middle attack. We've known how to deal with MITM attacks for decades: use public-key cryptography and a secure key exchange algorithm like Diffie-Hellman to create an authenticated, secure channel. That's how SSL works.
Credit and debit cards should contain a small microprocessor that communicates with bank, check its identity, and establish a secure channel. Even if an attacker could read and modify traffic between the card and the bank, he couldn't interfere with the transaction (other than by stopping it entirely).
Of course, this scheme doesn't allow offline credit card processing, but that's rare these days. If you still need to bother, just use an old-fashioned imprint machine.
The larger problem is just of backwards compatibility, which is why we'll never see the sensible scheme above implemented in our lifetimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks. I can't think of a way to describe the government statistics as anything but "misleading". It really doesn't matter, though, whether the Focus or the Escape is at the top of the list, except for PR purposes. What does matter is the aggregate fuel economy improvement, which is not in dispute, and the economic stimulus multiplier factor (which is also not in dispute). By the measurements that matter, the program has been a surprising success.
The fundamental basis of Chicago economics (which we've been using for the past 40 years) is that people and thus businesses are rational actors and make decisions that are best for their own interests.
That's pernicious fucking bullshit. People and companies make irrational decisions all the time. Consider the EPA cleanup mess: according to the idea of rational expectations, the prospect of having to pay for an EPA cleanup would be a strong deterrent to polluting. In reality, nobody cares, because the person who decides whether to pollute will be gone by the time the consequences of a decision to pollute become apparent. Thus, the company as a whole makes a rather irrational decision to pollute regardless.
You need proactive enforcement to stop these kinds of violations. Generally, trying t stop a given behavior by threatening companies (or people) with consequences over a time horizon of a few years is completely ineffective in stopping that behavior.
Thanks for letting me know when I could stop reading your post.
What if we specifically bred a human that wanted to pick cotton? Most of us would find that reprehensible, right?
Once we create a self-aware AI that can use language, we won't think of it as a kind of livestock, but instead as a completely different kind of being. The only reason we consider it acceptable to yoke an ox to plow a field, or a horse to draw a cart, is that these animals aren't sentient. Putting a sentient AI to work for us would rightly be regarded as a form of slavery.
In general, you're right. But we're talking about ISPs here. It's their network -- of course they can get it layer 2!
It's called ARP.
And more interestingly, where have they gotten all these moderation points?
Why not...
Two hearts? difficult to coordinate two hearts. Also, chances are that if damage is extreme enough to destroy the heart, chances are that a backup heart wouldn't significantly boost the chance of reproductive success after that point. (Heart disease is irrelevant as it occurs after reproductive age.)
Two brains? first of all, it'd be impossible to coordinate the actions of two brains. Second, the brain already has quite a bit of internal redundancy. Sufficiently young children with entire hemispheres removed can grow up normally. People who suffer multiple concussions can still switch in spare circuitry and return to normal capacity (at least until later in life.)
Two mouths? Where would you put the second one, and what structure would you develop into it? Evolution doesn't allow an organism to develop a structure wherever it would be convenient, but only to modify existing ones to suit a new purpose.
The kidney is a simple organ prone to infection and mounted in a vulnerable position in the body. I can definitely see how having a spare would increase the odds of reproductive success at minimum cost.
(Warning: original research)
I've measured the frequency of organs are referenced in Shakespeare's complete works, including sonnets and other poems. The corpus I used was the World Library version of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare available via Project Gutenberg. It doesn't mention whether these are folio or quarto versions, so the results are approximation. In each category, I included singular and plural forms as labeled below.
(I'm not even going to try to cover Shakespeare's references to sex organs.)
heart(s): 1208
brain(s): 139
womb(s): 56
stomach(s): 59
vein(s)/artery/arteries: 43
gall: 36
liver(s): 33
spleen(s): 30
lung(s): 19
intestine(s)/guts: 17
kidney(s): 2
bladder/bladders(s): 1 [some mentions of bladder don't refer to the organ]
Shakespeare thus appears to have had has anatomical priorities in order.
Yep, and humors drain to the lowest point along equipotent Chi lines, facilitating the conservation of crystal energy according to Hubbard's Law.
See? Using big words doesn't suddenly transmute your idea from bullshit into science.
And you forget why we allow businesses to exist: to benefit society in the process of enriching the shareholders. It's a social contract, and lately, businesses have been abrogating their responsibility to the society that allows them to exist.
Then who's buying the billions in US bonds the government is selling? (And don't say China -- they're not even close to buying them all.)
As a small business owner, I bet you vote for the party that does though. That's disgusting. I've had enough of this kind of moral calculus: the kind of treatment works here receive is outright illegal in Western Europe. Society there hasn't collapsed: in fact, they're better off for it. So screw your pro-business rhetoric. There comes a point when being anti-business is also anti-people, but we're nowhere near that point.
Wicked lies. Bondholders lose out as inflation reduces the effective interest rate. Poor people don't have "assets" to speak of --- that's why they're poor. When wages keep pace with inflation, poor people at worst aren't affected.
100? That's low. Try 1,000 in some industries. Have you fucking considering that that very fact is what's dragging the United States down into the abyss? In what fucking world is that wealth disparity acceptable?
Are you claiming that's how things should be?
Econ 101? Here's Econ 102: It's far better for ordinary people to live in an economy with full employment and moderate-high inflation than suffer higher unemployment via the IS-LM curve so that a few people with access to "capital" don't see it decline in value so quickly.
Let me say that again: inflation is a good thing so long as it's driven by wages.
That's why our economy in the United States took off like a rocket after World War II: sure, part of it was that everyone else was bombed out. But a larger factor was four years of sustained full employment at high wages had transferred quite a bit of wealth and created a robust middle that would only start to be systematically dismantled when Reagan took office.
Entitled? Motherfucking entitled!? Why yes, I am entitled to respect. If you'd lived 100 years ago, you'd have complained about the whiners who only wanted to work 40 hours a week, not 80, and hey, if you got black lung on a coal mine and died at 40, it's your fault. You'd have said that working in the textile mills gave kids more character. Fuck you. People like you make it impossible to restore in this country the balance between labor and capital. You're not a tycoon browsing Slashdot. Why do you insist on arguing against your own best interests and those of everyone you know?
So how do voltage and current leaks invalidate the universal mathematical principles of computer science? I'm beginning to get a whiff of anti-intellectualism here.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Data structures and algorithms don't suddenly work differently when they're synthesized from Verilog instead of compiled from C.
Thank you for this lucid post. This is the kind of discussion that allows me to put up with the ignorant hordes here.
You don't make purchases with a card, but instead with the bank account the card represents. There are two parts to every transaction: identification and authorization. When using an ATM, the physical card provides both identification and authorization. The account number is simply placed on the card, and authentication comes from physical ownership of the card. (PINs don't count because they are unfortunately verified based on machine-readable information on the card itself.) Because it's non-trivial to both learn an account number and manufacture a matching card, physical possession of the card is a pretty good proxy for control of the account.
Online purchases are different: the identification still comes from the number printed on the card, but the authorization is based on the notion that account numbers are hard to guess (which is terrible security), or on a secret shared by the bank and the holder of the card, the CSC number on the back (which is merely bad security).
If you wanted, you could make online purchases work the same way they do today, and just keep printing CSC numbers on the back of cards. The ATM authorization scheme and the online one don't have anything to do with each other.
But if you're going to issue new cards, you might as well improve online security too, and stop using CSC numbers. Have customers just select a password for each account. Retailers would verify the password the same way they verify CSC numbers now, but because the password wouldn't be printed on the back of the card, stealing the physical card wouldn't give you the ability to make online purchases using that card.
Better still would be a way for the card to interact online with the bank, but that seems impractical to me.
It's all right for ATMs to be able to read old-style static tokens, but if new cards include both the token and the chip, then a compromised ATM can simply use the old-style authentication token to perform a fraudulent transaction. After all, aren't both schemes just as good from the banks point of view?
Now, if you guys have managed to phase out cards with offline, static tokens and rely solely on the chip, then kudos to you.
The fake-ATM problem is just a man in the middle attack. We've known how to deal with MITM attacks for decades: use public-key cryptography and a secure key exchange algorithm like Diffie-Hellman to create an authenticated, secure channel. That's how SSL works.
Credit and debit cards should contain a small microprocessor that communicates with bank, check its identity, and establish a secure channel. Even if an attacker could read and modify traffic between the card and the bank, he couldn't interfere with the transaction (other than by stopping it entirely).
Of course, this scheme doesn't allow offline credit card processing, but that's rare these days. If you still need to bother, just use an old-fashioned imprint machine.
The larger problem is just of backwards compatibility, which is why we'll never see the sensible scheme above implemented in our lifetimes.