But revenue is not all profit. The cable company pays the sports channels for each subscriber that receives the channel. The cable company builds a tier and sets a price for it that includes the amounts that each channel demands. I don't know if the cable company's cost for the tier is the same as what you pay for the tier, or if the cable company adds in a little extra, but I suspect there isn't much profit there. If all of the Fox Sports, ESPNs, and the college sports networks are on a tier that costs the customer $50, I suspect that's about what the sports channels are demanding. If so, then the cable company doesn't really care if you get it or not because they don't lose any profits from you dropping that tier, their profits would all come from the amount you pay for basic service.
The tiers then exist to keep customers happy, allowing those that would not buy any service without the premium content to get it, while others pay for the basic package. The cable company has every reason to give customers a low priced option for the basic package, because every additional basic subscriber is almost entirely profit because the basic channels are are nearly free, but the company still collects the fee for your basic service, which is why the cable company can bundle them for the basic price of service.
If they are going to offer a la carte, I would like the smallest tiers possible. Besides basic, the only channels I'm really interested in are ESPN and my regional Fox Sports affiliate. Those are the only two channels that offer games I'm interested that aren't on my basic service tier. Going forward, I might be interested in an educational tier since our children are entering the age were they might benefit from access to the History channel as well as others. As it currently works, I don't think they offer tiers of completely similar programming because the companies that own the channels demand that all of their channels be on the same tier even if they don't really have the same market focus (ESPN, ABC and Disney Channel). Why do the companies do this? They only have to get you to want one of the channels, and they force you to pay for all of them. The cable company is just the middle guy who signs the contract that allows them to carry the service, then advertises you to buy the product.
I find it ridiculous that every time a channel threatens to pull service from a cable station, the channel demands that customers call the cable company and tell them to negotiate with the company, which gives the channel negotiating leverage to ask for more money in programming fees, which will eventually be passed on to the customer in the next annual price increase. Every freaking time, I'm rooting for the cable company to hold out, starve the channel of viewers, so they'll eventually cave in without getting more money to the cable company to drive up the next round of price increases. But the channels always wait until right before some big game that will be on their channel (a playoff game involving a local team, or the NCAA tournament), then threaten to pull their programming so customers will frantically blame the cable company not realizing they are asking to pay more for their cable bill.
Go look at the stock market moves and multiple stock market drops within the Great Depression, which was in part caused by the collapse of the Roaring Twenties. It took a decade to build that bubble, and a decade and World War II (destroying much of Europe's capital assets in the process which probably benefited us since they probably needed to buy much of what they used to rebuild from us) to recover, a period that included multiple drops over the course of over half a decade. We are coming off of a 17 year bubble, from late in Reagan's first term through the end of the Clinton administration. This is just the continuing of the correction of everything that happened in the late 80s and the 90s.
A few years ago, I read an analysis of the the history of the stock market since the War, and they indicated that the market has been running in 17 year cycles. From the 1932 low to 1966 peak: 34 years, not normal due to WW II and U.S. having unaffected capital assets coming out of the war that were used to rebuild Europe. From the Oct 1965 peak to June 1983 when the market started to increase: ~17.6 years. From June 1983 to the end of the internet bubble in Oct 2000: ~17.3 years, mostly inflation and credit driven. From 2000 until the end of this current situation, if it holds at around 17 years, will come in 2017 or early 2018. The market did peak in 2007, but that was an attempt to continue the previous bubble. If you want to count that as the new date, then we need to reset and start counting from 2007, and not expect things to improve until the 2025.
If you were to read what Robert Prechter has to say, utilizing the Fibonacci sequence and Elliot Wave Theory, he believes this is the end of a 200+ year super cycle. His analysis indicates that the stock market moves in natural patterns, regardless of time periods. So, what you see in a 5 minute chart will also occur in a daily or monthly chart. What happens in smaller time scales happens in smaller increments, but it's all related. So on a daily chart, the market might go up for a month, then down for a few days. On a monthly chart, it goes up for one period, then down a little the next. So each up or down in the market is a smaller up or down in the next larger time frame. Prechter says that there are 8 time frames: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks/months, years, decades and centuries. The Great Depression was a collapse that was significant on the decade level, resetting things from the previous decade cycle end, probably in the 1800s. The period we are going through now is a century level correction, meaning what we are about to go through is bigger than anything that's happened since the 1700s.
I'm holding my 401k and IRA assets in cash. In about another 5-6 years, I will build a plan to invest my funds which will have accumulated to over 50,000. I'll select 4 investments, that cover a large swath of the market, and put equal parts of 80-90% of my funds in each with the remaining in a bond fund. Every year, balance the fund back to the starting percentages. This takes money out of what ever has done well, and is likely to perform less well the next year, and uses it to buy the parts of the market that have underperformed, and historically, one of those other parts will do better in the next period.
My investments will include a value or income fund (mature or struggling companies), a commodity fund (oil, gold, agriculture markets, etc), a growth fund (younger companies), and an international fund.
An aside, I presume people may decide (rightly or wrongly) that the secular program of the last few centuries has failed. We may see a large surge in people returning to religion at that time, increased conflict between different parts of the world due to economic problems and religious differences. There is an old Chinese curse that says "May you live in interesting times." If Prechter is right, we are about to live through the most interesting times the world has ever seen, a super cycle collapse compounded by our technology driven world.
To some degree, it was an extension of the housing bubble. Because loan rates were low, the schools could sell you on the fact that your future salary would offset your higher costs of attending. Federally subsidized loans allowed schools to increase tuition to pull a higher percentage of that loan money from the government, and now that it's drying up, education will probably go through the same shake down that housing has been going through.
I wonder if this is the case in Kansas as far as acceptance. We have automatic acceptance of Kansas graduated students to state schools (Kansas, Kansas State, Pittsburg State, Emporia State, Wichita State, Fort Hays State) assuming you meet one of three trivially easy standards, 1)ACT score of 21, 2) graduate in the top third of your high school class, or 3) GPA of 2.0 taken from 4 years of English, 3 of science, 3 of math, and 1 each in government, history and either world geography or history.
I absolutely agree about the not needing a degree, especially if you are trained in a trade, and your primary goal is getting a job. My brother-in-law makes more than I do as a lineman for the rural coop. He spent far less time and money getting up to speed as an electrician, and was earning pretty good money by the time he was 20.
Another good route to go is military, get in a good training program, and the government will train you in whatever you want to learn. You probably earn less while you're getting it, but its a guaranteed job, you'll have your training, and I assume if you decide to hit college later, you've got the G.I. bill.
Considering the size of pigeons, and the amount of milk you can get out of one, as well as the time it will take to hook one up to get the milk, I imagine the price will be pretty high in order to pay for the retrieval of the milk, which will further reduce the demand.
Note: The summary says 'Although high in fat' indicating that's a point against it. Fat is a nutritional positive. It makes you feel full which will limit the amount you eat to feel full. Your body uses fat in very important ways. Your body does not store fat in fat cells. Your body makes fat out of carbohydrates, namely wheat products, corn products, and potatoes. I've switched to the primal diet, although I cheat, and I've lost at least 10 pounds of fat in the last few months.
An elevator, if built would be worth it. Consider that we could daily send up more matter in a day than we currently lift in a year, for a fraction of the cost. People could ride up just for the fun of it. Is it currently technically feasible? Of course not, but decades of inexpensive lifting material into space will pay for itself eventually, and after that, it's practically free. But that only comes into play if the technical limitations are eventually overcome.
All neyla was saying is that rocket launched solar power can never be cost competitive because the cost of setting up the system is hundreds of times more expensive than the cost of setting up the same hardware in the desert, and doubling or even tripling efficiency will never make up that cost differential. The only way to reduce the cost of getting solar panels into space is to use something far more cost efficient, like a space elevator, or launching a panel manufacturing facility, finding the necessary materials, and building the materials in space without ever having to lift them out of the gravity well, which also isn't currently feasible.
It should mean that. If a dozen ordinary engineers would come up with the same idea, I think that makes it obvious.
Frankly, if I were designing the patent system, all the patent office would have to do would write and publish a description of what an invention does. If anybody can reasonably describe the solution in detail a month, the patent is considered invalid. Patent has to be clearly better than any proposed alternatives to be considered an invention. The possibility could remain of to have tiered patents, if nobody comes close to the solution, it gets 15 years of protection, if one or two similar solutions or identical solutions are found, it's good for 1 or 3 years of protection, but if multiple solutions are found, the invention is considered obvious and disallowed. Software patents are 1/5 the length of hardware patents. Entire process should be weighted against granting any patents.
Benefits: Simplification of the patent approval process. Companies should be motivated to hire engineers to spend time invalidating other companies patents, and in spare time, they can document solutions found, maybe contributing the information to a repository of failed patents that would serve to supplement the patent office by offering documentation for standards and obvious inventions.
Market trading is a zero sum game. What if the price of a hypothetical $2billion trade increased to 2.1billion? The $100 million the seller, was given up by the buyer. There is no net change in the total net worth of the two traders so, economically, this is a zero sum game. Over time, the stock may be worth more than the trade price or less, but it's still a zero sum game. If the investment goes up, the buyer benefits. But the seller may regret not owning the investment. Likewise, if the seller is relieved to have sold if the price goes down, the buyer regrets buying the stock.
Obviously, investing in profitable companies changes things because you can come out ahead by buying and collecting the profits, but that isn't the stock market. That's investing, which can be done without the market, on smaller scales anyway.
The Catholic Church did not approve the use of condoms, even in this instance. All the Pope said, in an informal way (not a formal teaching at all), is that if a person is moving from having 'unprotected' sex to using a condom (with the intent to prevent HIV infection) on the way to practicing what the Church teaches, sex only in heterosexual marriages, then it might be a positive step in the right direction.
I don't know how the bandwidth distribution works in other countries but in the U.S., the auctions of frequencies and mergers of many large players have concentrated power in a few hands. The bandwidth auctions are basically a hidden tax on the people that works like this: Company borrows a LOT of money to secure rights to use frequencies. This money is like a large voluntary tax the companies buying the rights agree to pay in advance, and then collect from the customers, with the right to keep all of the money since they have already pre-paid the tax. Company builds (minimal?) infrastructure. Company has loans to pay for buying frequencies (prepaying the tax) and building the infrastructure. Whenever the loans are paid off, the company has a near monopoly, customers have gotten used to paying high prices, and with no competition, they get to continue charging high rates.
I'm not sure if the companies still hold the debt or if they've paid it off at this point, but mergers are going to continue to prevent competition going forward even if the debt to secure the frequencies is paid off.
Responding to my own post. Reading that article and seeing how a bookstore is responding, it's an interesting dynamic. If it were any other publisher, the bookstore would jump all over the book, but the dynamics of Amazon competing by selling to the customer directly as well as being the primary force propelling the market toward digitalization is causing this reaction. If some other publisher would offer a lower price product that might move more copies, most retailers would jump all over it if it made them more competitive.
Interesting to point out the contraception issue in a story about the pope who actually published the document at the height of the sexual revolution that reaffirmed the Church's teaching on the issue in the 1960s, Humane Vitae (which I agree with). Of course, there were two other popes who were notable for their statements opposing contraception in the last century, Pius XI (Wrote a document opposing contraception less than two years after the Church of England became the first Christian organization to allow contraception among married people) and John Paul II who may have actually written Humane Vitae as a Cardinal before writing hundreds of pages (known as the Theology of the Body) and reading them in St. Peter's square during the first five years of his papacy.
Any time you get an invite to participate in anything (say a quiz) on Facebook, it requests that you give the company that runs that program rights to view all of your information, instead of a small set of closely relevant information, or blocking all access to information but still getting to use the program anyway.
I'm pretty sure I've never heard of Google giving access to my personal information to outside organizations. Sure, I've given Google that access, and I let them profit from it to pay for the utility they provide, but at least the information is contained. Once any Facebook affiliate has access to it, how do you know that they haven't shared it with every hacker on the internet?
Sorry to hear about your situation. I have an opinion on why things are the way they are, and as I specified in my post, not having a choice is part of what is killing us, along with government underpaying on medicare which passes on the cost for medicare covered individuals on to the rest of us, as well as not going after tort reform, which forces doctors to bump their rates up $25 dollars an hour.
However, those companies are not the same company that's providing this insurance, although I suppose they could have the same parent company. Wishing this company ill will would be like getting mad at Ford because your brother was killed in a defective Toyota.
Do you know when such an event will happen, how often, or how expensive one or more incidents may be? With insurance, you can balance the cost. You pay a set amount, and when it happens, you've already been paying for it over time. So this smooths out the lumps by spreading the cost over many years instead of focusing the cost all in one or two quarters.
For instance, as an individual, with health insurance, I know that at some point, I or someone in my household will end up in the hospital. I can either buy insurance, or I can set aside the same amount of money (assuming I have access to all of the funds used to buy the insurance, which in the U.S. would mean the employer's portion.) Set aside 12 years of premiums, and you might have $100,000 which might be enough to cover all of the expenses you would incur over the 12 years. It might even more than cover it. Maybe everybody is healthy, and you only spend $20,000 over those years. Still, it does make some economic sense to buy the insurance because the potential losses could easily be higher than the $100,000, and even if your costs matched the $100,000, you might have to pony up all of that money in the first three years, or the last three. Buying insurance, you're paying out $8000 a year, plus deductibles in the over the 12 years.
For a business, this makes further sense, because it helps match the expense with when it occurs. Not with the OCCURRENCE of the incident, but with the RISK, which in probably constant over time, at least as far as most people can tell.
OT rant: What's wrong with the insurance company? Is it that some insurance companies are inclined to not pay on health?
Realize, different types of insurance are sold by different companies. For instance, Blue Cross and other insurance companies don't cover property damage or sell life insurance policies. With non-health insurance, you probably have a choice, and I don't hear near as many bad comments about them as I hear about health insurance. Why? Probably because you can easily switch insurance providers for property insurance, and you had a choice when you bought your life insurance. Unfortunately, with health, most people are tied, by virtue of employer selected health care plans to a provider that they don't have any say in. I have the feeling if I had the cash that my employer pays Aetna for my insurance coverage, I could go select something else, I could probably get a better deal. I hear health insurance coops are a good alternative, although they have similar restrictions as the for profit organizations.
Use the library. You're probably already paying for it with your taxes.
We are watching TV shows on DVD as well as movies. Do we miss out on being up to date? No. Plus we have the opportunity of waiting to find out what other people consider entertaining before we spend the time and effort to watch it.
Fund it the old way, with private money. Business people who have acquired tens of millions or more money tend to know how to hold people accountable. If you give some benevolent millionaires and billionaires the opportunity to invest, with the understanding that they'll receive plenty of recognition, or the ability to auction the access time scientists want to buy (money they can get when they request funding for their research), you might be surprised at how quickly they will pony up the money, and how quickly they will turn this project around by figuring out who knows what they are doing, and who needs to be gotten rid of, and make the priority getting this thing into space instead of whatever the bureaucratic incentives are within NASA and the government. If the telescope time were able to bring in $2 million per day, that would bring in $700 million a year. After paying for scientists, communications, paying back the investment, you could see 600 million a year in profits, maybe with the understanding that once they've doubled their money, the ownership of the telescope reverts to a foundation that lowers the price but keeps it high enough to fund development of the next great space telescope.
I think that sounds a lot better than tossing the whole thing on the scrap heap.
Check out movies from your library? Paid for by property taxes. We are watching 1980s comedies and two of TV shows on DVD (Chuck and Modern Family). There is a time lag, but with a price of 'already paid for', you might be willing to wait.
The GP was trying to calculate based on the number of work years. That is, if he was on a plane or in the airport everyday from 8-5, when regular folks are at the office.
It's one thing to copy human a physical human behavior, or to even be able to calculate something like the traveling salesman problem. It's another thing entirely to develop the ability to start an intelligence that naturally absorbs sensory on educational information, identifies patterns and holes in information, turns that into a question, and then follows the correct steps to learn what is unknown. Between us and a machine that can do that, we'd still have personality and drives (survival, success, companionship, etc.), and those may not even be necessary to have intelligence.
Until the AI scientists realize that mimicking human senses and mobility won't lead automatically to human-like intelligence, they won't get any closer to machines that can replace human thought.
I had a philosopher instructor a decade ago. He said the difference between computers and humans is that we are more than the sum of our parts (this drew upon the idea of Platonic forms). That is, at an atomic level, we are basically a mixture of carbon and water, but we can do more than a corpse made of the same things, which would be our natural physical state. We can think new thoughts, build new tools, and to do new things. A computer, at least ones we can currently build can do none of those things. Someone thinking thoughts can use a computer to make tools, or do things more efficiently, but until a computer can accomplish any of these tasks, it won't be intelligent:
---The computer can look at the U.S. budget deficit, and come up with a balanced budget that will make most citizens reasonably happy, or figure out how to structure a health care bill that will provide every one with excellent care at an affordable price. You might think that the failure of the U.S. government to do so means that nobody can, but that is a failure of politics, not intelligence.
---When computers can think of new problems and come up with the solution or write software to automate a task without an outside designer and programmer, then the AI field will be on the right track.
---When a computer can come into contact with a piece of art (photo, literature, comic), understand it, and have it mean something that the computer can learn from, and then examine something else, and apply the lessons learned to this new thing, and sort among many different things its learned to figure out which ones are most similar.
In any of these, the computer will have gone beyond it's programming to become autonomously intelligent.
Humans are open ended. Computers, robots and software are designed to solve a specific problem, with known limits. Currently machines are made to be generalists, that is to perform tasks that are not thought of when made, if somebody thinks of something new, but they don't have the ability, within themselves, to go beyond what they are explicitly programmed to do. Designing a computer that has the open ended ability to think they way we do is something we are still nowhere close to solving yet. When I read the grad student's comment at the end of your comment, it is obvious to me now, after years of observing failure of fellow Slashdotters failing to identify this issue as the roadblock in the way of AI progress in every Slashdot discussion on AI I've ever witnessed, such that it's become automatic for me to expect this lack of comprehension.
Don't give them permission to continue to drive up prices. That is don't go. I've stopped going myself, but I have more important things to spend money on.
Set the money not spent on tickets aside for a number of months/years necessary to acquire a decent home theater setup. Get the movies free at the library or start a movie club with other like minded individuals. If enough people do it, eventually the theaters will push back on the movie makers to reduce ticket prices. But as long as the makers/producers make record box offices, and the theaters continue to overcharge for the concessions at the door, things will continue to get worse.
Slashdot Mirror
But revenue is not all profit. The cable company pays the sports channels for each subscriber that receives the channel. The cable company builds a tier and sets a price for it that includes the amounts that each channel demands. I don't know if the cable company's cost for the tier is the same as what you pay for the tier, or if the cable company adds in a little extra, but I suspect there isn't much profit there. If all of the Fox Sports, ESPNs, and the college sports networks are on a tier that costs the customer $50, I suspect that's about what the sports channels are demanding. If so, then the cable company doesn't really care if you get it or not because they don't lose any profits from you dropping that tier, their profits would all come from the amount you pay for basic service.
The tiers then exist to keep customers happy, allowing those that would not buy any service without the premium content to get it, while others pay for the basic package. The cable company has every reason to give customers a low priced option for the basic package, because every additional basic subscriber is almost entirely profit because the basic channels are are nearly free, but the company still collects the fee for your basic service, which is why the cable company can bundle them for the basic price of service.
If they are going to offer a la carte, I would like the smallest tiers possible. Besides basic, the only channels I'm really interested in are ESPN and my regional Fox Sports affiliate. Those are the only two channels that offer games I'm interested that aren't on my basic service tier. Going forward, I might be interested in an educational tier since our children are entering the age were they might benefit from access to the History channel as well as others. As it currently works, I don't think they offer tiers of completely similar programming because the companies that own the channels demand that all of their channels be on the same tier even if they don't really have the same market focus (ESPN, ABC and Disney Channel). Why do the companies do this? They only have to get you to want one of the channels, and they force you to pay for all of them. The cable company is just the middle guy who signs the contract that allows them to carry the service, then advertises you to buy the product.
I find it ridiculous that every time a channel threatens to pull service from a cable station, the channel demands that customers call the cable company and tell them to negotiate with the company, which gives the channel negotiating leverage to ask for more money in programming fees, which will eventually be passed on to the customer in the next annual price increase. Every freaking time, I'm rooting for the cable company to hold out, starve the channel of viewers, so they'll eventually cave in without getting more money to the cable company to drive up the next round of price increases. But the channels always wait until right before some big game that will be on their channel (a playoff game involving a local team, or the NCAA tournament), then threaten to pull their programming so customers will frantically blame the cable company not realizing they are asking to pay more for their cable bill.
Go look at the stock market moves and multiple stock market drops within the Great Depression, which was in part caused by the collapse of the Roaring Twenties. It took a decade to build that bubble, and a decade and World War II (destroying much of Europe's capital assets in the process which probably benefited us since they probably needed to buy much of what they used to rebuild from us) to recover, a period that included multiple drops over the course of over half a decade. We are coming off of a 17 year bubble, from late in Reagan's first term through the end of the Clinton administration. This is just the continuing of the correction of everything that happened in the late 80s and the 90s.
A few years ago, I read an analysis of the the history of the stock market since the War, and they indicated that the market has been running in 17 year cycles. From the 1932 low to 1966 peak: 34 years, not normal due to WW II and U.S. having unaffected capital assets coming out of the war that were used to rebuild Europe.
From the Oct 1965 peak to June 1983 when the market started to increase: ~17.6 years.
From June 1983 to the end of the internet bubble in Oct 2000: ~17.3 years, mostly inflation and credit driven.
From 2000 until the end of this current situation, if it holds at around 17 years, will come in 2017 or early 2018. The market did peak in 2007, but that was an attempt to continue the previous bubble. If you want to count that as the new date, then we need to reset and start counting from 2007, and not expect things to improve until the 2025.
If you were to read what Robert Prechter has to say, utilizing the Fibonacci sequence and Elliot Wave Theory, he believes this is the end of a 200+ year super cycle. His analysis indicates that the stock market moves in natural patterns, regardless of time periods. So, what you see in a 5 minute chart will also occur in a daily or monthly chart. What happens in smaller time scales happens in smaller increments, but it's all related. So on a daily chart, the market might go up for a month, then down for a few days. On a monthly chart, it goes up for one period, then down a little the next. So each up or down in the market is a smaller up or down in the next larger time frame. Prechter says that there are 8 time frames: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks/months, years, decades and centuries. The Great Depression was a collapse that was significant on the decade level, resetting things from the previous decade cycle end, probably in the 1800s. The period we are going through now is a century level correction, meaning what we are about to go through is bigger than anything that's happened since the 1700s.
I'm holding my 401k and IRA assets in cash. In about another 5-6 years, I will build a plan to invest my funds which will have accumulated to over 50,000. I'll select 4 investments, that cover a large swath of the market, and put equal parts of 80-90% of my funds in each with the remaining in a bond fund. Every year, balance the fund back to the starting percentages. This takes money out of what ever has done well, and is likely to perform less well the next year, and uses it to buy the parts of the market that have underperformed, and historically, one of those other parts will do better in the next period.
My investments will include a value or income fund (mature or struggling companies), a commodity fund (oil, gold, agriculture markets, etc), a growth fund (younger companies), and an international fund.
An aside, I presume people may decide (rightly or wrongly) that the secular program of the last few centuries has failed. We may see a large surge in people returning to religion at that time, increased conflict between different parts of the world due to economic problems and religious differences. There is an old Chinese curse that says "May you live in interesting times." If Prechter is right, we are about to live through the most interesting times the world has ever seen, a super cycle collapse compounded by our technology driven world.
To some degree, it was an extension of the housing bubble. Because loan rates were low, the schools could sell you on the fact that your future salary would offset your higher costs of attending. Federally subsidized loans allowed schools to increase tuition to pull a higher percentage of that loan money from the government, and now that it's drying up, education will probably go through the same shake down that housing has been going through.
I wonder if this is the case in Kansas as far as acceptance. We have automatic acceptance of Kansas graduated students to state schools (Kansas, Kansas State, Pittsburg State, Emporia State, Wichita State, Fort Hays State) assuming you meet one of three trivially easy standards, 1)ACT score of 21, 2) graduate in the top third of your high school class, or 3) GPA of 2.0 taken from 4 years of English, 3 of science, 3 of math, and 1 each in government, history and either world geography or history.
I absolutely agree about the not needing a degree, especially if you are trained in a trade, and your primary goal is getting a job. My brother-in-law makes more than I do as a lineman for the rural coop. He spent far less time and money getting up to speed as an electrician, and was earning pretty good money by the time he was 20.
Another good route to go is military, get in a good training program, and the government will train you in whatever you want to learn. You probably earn less while you're getting it, but its a guaranteed job, you'll have your training, and I assume if you decide to hit college later, you've got the G.I. bill.
Considering the size of pigeons, and the amount of milk you can get out of one, as well as the time it will take to hook one up to get the milk, I imagine the price will be pretty high in order to pay for the retrieval of the milk, which will further reduce the demand.
Note: The summary says 'Although high in fat' indicating that's a point against it. Fat is a nutritional positive. It makes you feel full which will limit the amount you eat to feel full. Your body uses fat in very important ways. Your body does not store fat in fat cells. Your body makes fat out of carbohydrates, namely wheat products, corn products, and potatoes. I've switched to the primal diet, although I cheat, and I've lost at least 10 pounds of fat in the last few months.
An elevator, if built would be worth it. Consider that we could daily send up more matter in a day than we currently lift in a year, for a fraction of the cost. People could ride up just for the fun of it. Is it currently technically feasible? Of course not, but decades of inexpensive lifting material into space will pay for itself eventually, and after that, it's practically free. But that only comes into play if the technical limitations are eventually overcome.
All neyla was saying is that rocket launched solar power can never be cost competitive because the cost of setting up the system is hundreds of times more expensive than the cost of setting up the same hardware in the desert, and doubling or even tripling efficiency will never make up that cost differential. The only way to reduce the cost of getting solar panels into space is to use something far more cost efficient, like a space elevator, or launching a panel manufacturing facility, finding the necessary materials, and building the materials in space without ever having to lift them out of the gravity well, which also isn't currently feasible.
It should mean that. If a dozen ordinary engineers would come up with the same idea, I think that makes it obvious.
Frankly, if I were designing the patent system, all the patent office would have to do would write and publish a description of what an invention does. If anybody can reasonably describe the solution in detail a month, the patent is considered invalid. Patent has to be clearly better than any proposed alternatives to be considered an invention. The possibility could remain of to have tiered patents, if nobody comes close to the solution, it gets 15 years of protection, if one or two similar solutions or identical solutions are found, it's good for 1 or 3 years of protection, but if multiple solutions are found, the invention is considered obvious and disallowed. Software patents are 1/5 the length of hardware patents. Entire process should be weighted against granting any patents.
Benefits:
Simplification of the patent approval process.
Companies should be motivated to hire engineers to spend time invalidating other companies patents, and in spare time, they can document solutions found, maybe contributing the information to a repository of failed patents that would serve to supplement the patent office by offering documentation for standards and obvious inventions.
Market trading is a zero sum game. What if the price of a hypothetical $2billion trade increased to 2.1billion? The $100 million the seller, was given up by the buyer. There is no net change in the total net worth of the two traders so, economically, this is a zero sum game. Over time, the stock may be worth more than the trade price or less, but it's still a zero sum game. If the investment goes up, the buyer benefits. But the seller may regret not owning the investment. Likewise, if the seller is relieved to have sold if the price goes down, the buyer regrets buying the stock.
Obviously, investing in profitable companies changes things because you can come out ahead by buying and collecting the profits, but that isn't the stock market. That's investing, which can be done without the market, on smaller scales anyway.
Leverage is a physics word. Use of it in business is an allusion to it's physics meaning.
The Catholic Church did not approve the use of condoms, even in this instance. All the Pope said, in an informal way (not a formal teaching at all), is that if a person is moving from having 'unprotected' sex to using a condom (with the intent to prevent HIV infection) on the way to practicing what the Church teaches, sex only in heterosexual marriages, then it might be a positive step in the right direction.
I don't know how the bandwidth distribution works in other countries but in the U.S., the auctions of frequencies and mergers of many large players have concentrated power in a few hands. The bandwidth auctions are basically a hidden tax on the people that works like this: Company borrows a LOT of money to secure rights to use frequencies. This money is like a large voluntary tax the companies buying the rights agree to pay in advance, and then collect from the customers, with the right to keep all of the money since they have already pre-paid the tax. Company builds (minimal?) infrastructure. Company has loans to pay for buying frequencies (prepaying the tax) and building the infrastructure. Whenever the loans are paid off, the company has a near monopoly, customers have gotten used to paying high prices, and with no competition, they get to continue charging high rates.
I'm not sure if the companies still hold the debt or if they've paid it off at this point, but mergers are going to continue to prevent competition going forward even if the debt to secure the frequencies is paid off.
Responding to my own post. Reading that article and seeing how a bookstore is responding, it's an interesting dynamic. If it were any other publisher, the bookstore would jump all over the book, but the dynamics of Amazon competing by selling to the customer directly as well as being the primary force propelling the market toward digitalization is causing this reaction. If some other publisher would offer a lower price product that might move more copies, most retailers would jump all over it if it made them more competitive.
Interesting to point out the contraception issue in a story about the pope who actually published the document at the height of the sexual revolution that reaffirmed the Church's teaching on the issue in the 1960s, Humane Vitae (which I agree with). Of course, there were two other popes who were notable for their statements opposing contraception in the last century, Pius XI (Wrote a document opposing contraception less than two years after the Church of England became the first Christian organization to allow contraception among married people) and John Paul II who may have actually written Humane Vitae as a Cardinal before writing hundreds of pages (known as the Theology of the Body) and reading them in St. Peter's square during the first five years of his papacy.
Any time you get an invite to participate in anything (say a quiz) on Facebook, it requests that you give the company that runs that program rights to view all of your information, instead of a small set of closely relevant information, or blocking all access to information but still getting to use the program anyway.
I'm pretty sure I've never heard of Google giving access to my personal information to outside organizations. Sure, I've given Google that access, and I let them profit from it to pay for the utility they provide, but at least the information is contained. Once any Facebook affiliate has access to it, how do you know that they haven't shared it with every hacker on the internet?
Sorry to hear about your situation. I have an opinion on why things are the way they are, and as I specified in my post, not having a choice is part of what is killing us, along with government underpaying on medicare which passes on the cost for medicare covered individuals on to the rest of us, as well as not going after tort reform, which forces doctors to bump their rates up $25 dollars an hour.
However, those companies are not the same company that's providing this insurance, although I suppose they could have the same parent company. Wishing this company ill will would be like getting mad at Ford because your brother was killed in a defective Toyota.
Do you know when such an event will happen, how often, or how expensive one or more incidents may be? With insurance, you can balance the cost. You pay a set amount, and when it happens, you've already been paying for it over time. So this smooths out the lumps by spreading the cost over many years instead of focusing the cost all in one or two quarters.
For instance, as an individual, with health insurance, I know that at some point, I or someone in my household will end up in the hospital. I can either buy insurance, or I can set aside the same amount of money (assuming I have access to all of the funds used to buy the insurance, which in the U.S. would mean the employer's portion.) Set aside 12 years of premiums, and you might have $100,000 which might be enough to cover all of the expenses you would incur over the 12 years. It might even more than cover it. Maybe everybody is healthy, and you only spend $20,000 over those years. Still, it does make some economic sense to buy the insurance because the potential losses could easily be higher than the $100,000, and even if your costs matched the $100,000, you might have to pony up all of that money in the first three years, or the last three. Buying insurance, you're paying out $8000 a year, plus deductibles in the over the 12 years.
For a business, this makes further sense, because it helps match the expense with when it occurs. Not with the OCCURRENCE of the incident, but with the RISK, which in probably constant over time, at least as far as most people can tell.
OT rant: What's wrong with the insurance company? Is it that some insurance companies are inclined to not pay on health?
Realize, different types of insurance are sold by different companies. For instance, Blue Cross and other insurance companies don't cover property damage or sell life insurance policies. With non-health insurance, you probably have a choice, and I don't hear near as many bad comments about them as I hear about health insurance. Why? Probably because you can easily switch insurance providers for property insurance, and you had a choice when you bought your life insurance. Unfortunately, with health, most people are tied, by virtue of employer selected health care plans to a provider that they don't have any say in. I have the feeling if I had the cash that my employer pays Aetna for my insurance coverage, I could go select something else, I could probably get a better deal. I hear health insurance coops are a good alternative, although they have similar restrictions as the for profit organizations.
Use the library. You're probably already paying for it with your taxes.
We are watching TV shows on DVD as well as movies. Do we miss out on being up to date? No. Plus we have the opportunity of waiting to find out what other people consider entertaining before we spend the time and effort to watch it.
It's been a long time since I inquired about it, but I don't think the shuttle was even capable of getting to the moon, much less Mars.
Fund it the old way, with private money. Business people who have acquired tens of millions or more money tend to know how to hold people accountable. If you give some benevolent millionaires and billionaires the opportunity to invest, with the understanding that they'll receive plenty of recognition, or the ability to auction the access time scientists want to buy (money they can get when they request funding for their research), you might be surprised at how quickly they will pony up the money, and how quickly they will turn this project around by figuring out who knows what they are doing, and who needs to be gotten rid of, and make the priority getting this thing into space instead of whatever the bureaucratic incentives are within NASA and the government. If the telescope time were able to bring in $2 million per day, that would bring in $700 million a year. After paying for scientists, communications, paying back the investment, you could see 600 million a year in profits, maybe with the understanding that once they've doubled their money, the ownership of the telescope reverts to a foundation that lowers the price but keeps it high enough to fund development of the next great space telescope.
I think that sounds a lot better than tossing the whole thing on the scrap heap.
Check out movies from your library? Paid for by property taxes. We are watching 1980s comedies and two of TV shows on DVD (Chuck and Modern Family). There is a time lag, but with a price of 'already paid for', you might be willing to wait.
The GP was trying to calculate based on the number of work years. That is, if he was on a plane or in the airport everyday from 8-5, when regular folks are at the office.
Invite received. Thank you Luis.
ericrun (gmail)
It's one thing to copy human a physical human behavior, or to even be able to calculate something like the traveling salesman problem. It's another thing entirely to develop the ability to start an intelligence that naturally absorbs sensory on educational information, identifies patterns and holes in information, turns that into a question, and then follows the correct steps to learn what is unknown. Between us and a machine that can do that, we'd still have personality and drives (survival, success, companionship, etc.), and those may not even be necessary to have intelligence.
Until the AI scientists realize that mimicking human senses and mobility won't lead automatically to human-like intelligence, they won't get any closer to machines that can replace human thought.
I had a philosopher instructor a decade ago. He said the difference between computers and humans is that we are more than the sum of our parts (this drew upon the idea of Platonic forms). That is, at an atomic level, we are basically a mixture of carbon and water, but we can do more than a corpse made of the same things, which would be our natural physical state. We can think new thoughts, build new tools, and to do new things. A computer, at least ones we can currently build can do none of those things. Someone thinking thoughts can use a computer to make tools, or do things more efficiently, but until a computer can accomplish any of these tasks, it won't be intelligent:
---The computer can look at the U.S. budget deficit, and come up with a balanced budget that will make most citizens reasonably happy, or figure out how to structure a health care bill that will provide every one with excellent care at an affordable price. You might think that the failure of the U.S. government to do so means that nobody can, but that is a failure of politics, not intelligence.
---When computers can think of new problems and come up with the solution or write software to automate a task without an outside designer and programmer, then the AI field will be on the right track.
---When a computer can come into contact with a piece of art (photo, literature, comic), understand it, and have it mean something that the computer can learn from, and then examine something else, and apply the lessons learned to this new thing, and sort among many different things its learned to figure out which ones are most similar.
In any of these, the computer will have gone beyond it's programming to become autonomously intelligent.
Humans are open ended. Computers, robots and software are designed to solve a specific problem, with known limits. Currently machines are made to be generalists, that is to perform tasks that are not thought of when made, if somebody thinks of something new, but they don't have the ability, within themselves, to go beyond what they are explicitly programmed to do. Designing a computer that has the open ended ability to think they way we do is something we are still nowhere close to solving yet. When I read the grad student's comment at the end of your comment, it is obvious to me now, after years of observing failure of fellow Slashdotters failing to identify this issue as the roadblock in the way of AI progress in every Slashdot discussion on AI I've ever witnessed, such that it's become automatic for me to expect this lack of comprehension.
Don't give them permission to continue to drive up prices. That is don't go. I've stopped going myself, but I have more important things to spend money on.
Set the money not spent on tickets aside for a number of months/years necessary to acquire a decent home theater setup. Get the movies free at the library or start a movie club with other like minded individuals. If enough people do it, eventually the theaters will push back on the movie makers to reduce ticket prices. But as long as the makers/producers make record box offices, and the theaters continue to overcharge for the concessions at the door, things will continue to get worse.