I feel like the loopholes of non-standard bluetooth profiles miss the point and are a worse problem than allowing generic bluetooth mice generally. It's happened, but it feels like some kind of weird exception.
Apple *could* have allowed BT mice, but totally ignored them in standard UI APIs, so that nothing was mouse-enabled by default and required apps to use some other UI API to obtain mouse functionality. They protect the touch UI, apps that want to enable mouse functionality gain it without going down the road of a custom mouse with some weird BT profile.
I wish we would debate immigration itself and not get stuck in the weeds discussing walls, whether drugs or illegal immigrants come over the border frontier or airports and shipping containers, or whether they're all criminals, and all the other fringe elements of the debate.
I think there are serious questions about the economic impact of high levels of impoverished immigrants. They burden school districts, local social welfare systems, low-income housing, etc. Does their very low wage employment, even in an ideal situation where they are W-2 workers, actually pay off their added economic burden, or are they actually subsidized, perhaps even for a long time -- like a generation. Or even longer, since we know that escaping poverty is hard.
Our social welfare system does a very marginal job of serving US citizens, it seems unlikely to expand sufficiently to cover significant numbers of poor migrants and serve US citizens. This seems like a real issue to me.
Then there are real questions about the US job market and corporate hiring policies for non-impoverished immigrants. Very few of them are "rock star" types, most of them are cheap filler for corporate jobs that actually seems to harm skilled US workers.
All political systems have failure points -- Belgium had trouble forming a government for some time (months) due to conflicts between the Flemish and the Walloon. Italy has had dozens of governments due to party fragmentation. Proportional representation countries wind up with minor parties acting as kingmakers, warping policy or even politics.
All of those things seem "weird" in the US. You old an election and once elected, there's not enough majority to form a government? That seems weird from a US perspective, even though the political explanations make sense.
There was an old grain elevator I saw demolished, and it took a dedicated crew of construction people with heavy equipment a couple of weeks to bring it down -- battering the concrete with a wrecking ball, then guys torching the rebar enough to get the embedded concrete to crumble.
Some of the demonstration concrete walls look really difficult to penetrate, it's not like some burlap sack filled with hand tools would be sufficient you would probably need something a lot more sophisticated and a lot more time -- concrete saws, cutting torches for rebar, and possibly hours spent attacking the wall.
Maybe a doorway or something could be cut through it in a matter of hours with concrete saws and acetylene torches, but that's non-trivial effort. And I'd wager the people who build these could use techniques that frustrate simple mechanical attacks -- steel mesh in the concrete that damage concrete saw blades, for example.
If you have to haul hundreds of pounds or more equipment and tools to attack the wall, the wall becomes more useful the more remote it is because you can't just drive up with a 1 ton pickup filled with saws and torches, you have to haul it by hand.
One, they know that Facebook and online sharing is dominated by young people and they don't want to look "old" for not fully participating, and wind up over-participating in sharing, in trying to fit in. So it's kind of an overcompensation.
The other is generational -- older people grew in a world without instantaneous communication that relied more on person-person information sharing, whether it was just personal gossip or whether it was of a more functional nature (ie, swapping stories with fellow salesmen or something). Combine this with the often sensationalist nature of fake news, and it's not hard to see why older people who might be more sharing oriented with information anyway wind up prioritizing the most "amazing" news first.
It makes me wonder how much value there is in TV tracking data vs. the amount of resource applied to collecting it -- the software and hardware in the TV itself, the back-end data collection infrastructure, etc. I'm sure the cost addition right now is relatively low on a per set basis, but it seems like there will be an increasing demand for better data, requiring more software and maybe even more hardware to support the collection in the TV than the smart/streaming options themselves need, like some future TV that has an embedded cellular modem that makes data collection bypass even user cooperation.
It seems like there's some tipping point where the data just isn't as valuable as the resources it takes to collect it.
It also makes me wonder at what point Amazon or Netflix just comes out with their own smart TV, more heavily subsidized than the ones from a "TV" brand. You get a discount on the TV and the subscription to the sponsoring service, and in "exchange" they get super detailed viewing habits on their service as well as details on competing services.
Why the fuck hasn't Apple allowed bluetooth mice at least on an application-specific basis?
I'm mostly willing to go along with the idea why they're not allowed generically as input devices because Apple's precious touch interface would quickly get corrupted by mouse UI logic, but on a lot of apps the touch screen is totally worthless.
The paranoid part of me doesn't believe Microsoft is doing this to fix the update problem at all. Instead, they're allocating 'hidden space' on the drive to capture user sensitive data and store it for later uploads to Microsoft when the laptop/desktop is connected to the Internet.
The paranoid part of me wonders if this is the start of some kind of trend where it's basically expected that some largeish portion of user-purchased hardware -- storage, compute, connectivity is expected to be given over completely to its primary software vendor to support their business model. Whether it's mining cryptocurrency, providing distributed storage, obtaining extremely local telemetry (local RF monitoring, weather monitoring, traffic/geolocation, etc) and so on.
I mean, we're already partway there. Maps applications phone home to provide traffic congestion, crypto mining (albeit mostly malware-oriented) exists, Windows 10 has its "download and provide updates to local computers" settings, etc.
Maybe it becomes like commercials, part of the expected bargain for "free" stuff, which is also largely the basis for large scale "free" internet services in exchange for personal information.
Maybe it's something you buy your way out of, at least partially -- pay for Windows Deluxe Pro, and you buy down the amount of local resources you're expected to hand over to Microsoft for their cloud computing environment.
I think this is right, but the confounding factor is the extremely high number of low-end Mercedes I see anymore. I mean, like Honda Civic sized Mercedes. It used to be not that long ago that you'd mostly see S and E class Mercedes, and a very small number of C class. Now all I see are shitloads of low-end C class sedans and SUVs and very few S or E class anymore.
I don't doubt that a lot of suckers are leasing them because the interior experience is still mostly "Mercedes" and the outside has the 3 pointed star, but there are so many of them there's no exclusivity to it. Plus, they're really fucking tiny anymore. A Ford Escape or a Toyota Camry.
Maybe Mercedes have figured out they'll go broke only trying to sell S/E class cars to the dwindling number of people who can afford them or aren't buying Teslas, and they need cheaper cars to keep up their numbers. But it sure erodes the exclusivity factor.
I mean now I associate someone in a C class as not an exclusive individual, but a low-status individual trying super hard to project status they don't have. The same thing may have been true of S550 owners earlier, but it was a much more imposing statement.
Humans are social animals. Social status is almost directly correlated to physical health and is a major component of mental health.
Look what a dog will do to regain its social status -- tear through walls, walk miles, whatever it takes to get back to their pack.
I don't know what the parent poster's friend's life is like and neither do you, but she could have other aspects of her life that are so much worse off that whatever elevation in status the iPhone brings her actually compensates for the other things that drag down her social status.
Is it kind of shitty that it takes her an iPhone to gain some kind of peer acceptance? Probably, but then again, I don't know how much worse off her life would be without this group's acceptance, there may not be other social groups available or they may have other, worse, status markers she would have to obtain/endure.
Their problem was the profit trap. They were making so much profit off a single device that innovating into other products, even though they could easily afford it, was basically too risky because there's a good chance those products wouldn't have been as profitable as the phones. If you spend a billion in profits investing in a new device that only brings in 500 million in profits, you've basically lost 500 million dollars.
This holds back companies from innovating into new products or even substantially altering their existing products, as nearly any change won't return the profits it cost to deliver it.
IMHO, I think Apple's level of control over the iPhone was too great, too. They were unwilling to open up the platform very much for fear it would reduce their control of the product over the longer run. In theory an iPhone could do a lot more if there was greater hardware connectivity and software flexibility, but they've kept a lot of those innovation avenues cut off or severely restricted.
IMHO, Apple needs to more seriously look at making the iPhone the core platform of their entire computing platform, replacing low-end Macs with docks that let iPhones be the actual computer. They don't sell enough Macs at that level to really hurt them and it might allow some growth from people with iPhones and basic PC/laptop computers who won't switch to Mac computers but might be interested in a "desktop" that is driven by an iPhone. The CPU power is pretty much there for basic office productivity.
The CPC rules "uncontested" only in a symbolic way. There's over a billion people in China and a lot more than just Uncle Xi's agenda in play, both in the party, the economy and in regional areas. It's part of why China is so control-oriented because they know that any kind of national control in China is extremely tenuous.
There's has long been a lot of questions about China's economic numbers generally. Every few months there's some new initiative to reel in bad loans, stop over-production, etc. It's like people on Instagram -- there's the Instagram view of their life, and then there's the real view of their life which is a lot messier and uncertain.
Plus once the notion of economic insecurity gains traction among the population, the government's social control paranoia gets kicked into high gear. Their biggest fear may not be existential economic collapse but social upheaval caused by some kind of significant economic downturn they can't quickly reverse with internal economic policy or demand. The real genius of economic pressure on China isn't in the trade economics, it's playing on the psychology of the leadership's fear of losing social control.
And this is where China's lack of economic transparency hurts them internally; they themselves become victims of their own economic gamesmanship and sketchy economic data. It's like needing psychological help but using your Instagram self to explain your problems to the shrink.
My sense is the US gives up before they should not because they can't win, but because domestic political pressure among stakeholders affected by US policy to China causes it to shift. Dropping the tariffs will bump GDP numbers for a couple of quarters to produce "great economy" headlines to benefit politicians.
And really, "winning" is a complicated state anyway that nobody can really define. Long term concessions by the Chinese? Cutting back on state-sponsored IP theft/hacking? Simply fucking up the domestic Chinese economy enough that it causes them to shift funds from the military to prop up the economy? There's a ton of angles in play.
Since I live in Minnesota, it made complete sense to talk to someone who had panels installed on their comparably sized house.
This was a year ago or so, so I don't remember the figures but it was like a decade before they started to get that good "free" electricity due to paying off the panels.
The excess payments to pay off the panels over 10 years invested in a no-load index fund instead would have resulted in much greater return on investment that could have paid down utility costs to essentially zero and kept them there indefinitely.
I fully agree that the same setup in a warmer, sunnier state with a different electrical consumption pattern would probably shift the economics of it.
If you run a business, you're a known entity to the cops and as a business owner have a whole lot more credibility than someone random person who chose to ignore the "NO CASH ACCEPTED" signs.
The cops will more than likely side with the business owner and treat you like a non-paying customer, which is a crime in most places, not a "private transaction dispute". You're not trading grain futures here.
My guess is that the cops just care about the business owner not getting outright ripped off. They'd probably tell the owner to accept your cash, but probably also wouldn't require the owner to give you any change in return.
Yuck. Half the point of cooking up a 2 lb package of extra-thick bacon every so often is for filtering and saving the rendered fat for other cooking purposes.
Why do "nitrate free" products taste worse? I've been sampling both uncured (and apparently without even celery extract) and "nitrate free" (celery juice cured) breakfast meats and find both of them equally worse tasting than nitrate cured products.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
I'm sure the answer somewhere is tied to design decisions tied to security and the assumption that the user interface/computing functionality of headphone devices would always be primitive. Kind of 640K ought to be enough for everybody mindset.
But really, there's no reason that you have to give up security for added functionality. I'm pretty sure there could be a pairing/security mechanism that puts all the right keys on the right devices so they can listen to sender broadcasts.
Most bluetooth headphones that can pair with multiple devices have a clunky and non-standard method of switching between paired devices, often that depends with switching off bluetooth on one of them. Many can't pair with more than one device at all. Devices suck too, often not willing to output to more than one device (bluetooth or otherwise) at once.
So this means invariably unless you dedicate headphones to specific devices, your bluetooth configuration will most likely be wrong or require a bunch of intervention to get working.
I don't quite get why bluetooth (with some kind of protocol changes, most likely) couldn't be much smoother with multiple devices, allowing multi-device pairing (multicasting if you will) so your headphones could get audio from your pc, your phone, and whatever else all at the same time. And the fucking other devices should be willing to send so that all the paired receivers can receive audio.
The headphone jack problem would be a lot less bad if bluetooth worked right.
You can make buses more efficient without even increasing the number of buses by simply restricting where they will stop, say every 5 blocks vs. every block. This forces an extra 2 block walk, max, for every commuter.
Increasing buses definitely helps, but it's also expensive in terms of capital investment and fuel consumption.
Building subways was significantly easier 1900-1930 as they could use more intrusive construction like trench excavation and labor costs were a lot lower, in addition to lower costs for land acquisition.
Shanghai is an outlier because its subway was a byproduct of both crazy Chinese construction growth and a political system where there was not really room for opposition. I don't know the details of Madrid's expansion, but I suspect that it had a lot to do with cheap foreign loans that affected the Spanish economy and probably a long-term deficit in infrastructure development, which contributed to the political will.
I just don't see any of those factors leading to a massive subway system being built in the US anytime soon.
Don't forget the commuting enables labor mobility which is a massive boost to economic productivity. It'd be great if there was no commuting but you either need to have reduced labor mobility (ie, keeping less productive people in jobs) or greatly increased housing liquidity so people can move if they change jobs.
I think some of the logic of the anti-car urban factions in urban areas with poor public transit is:
1: Make driving a car difficult through reduced parking, more expensive parking, and street closures which worsen auto traffic
2: This forces drivers onto public transit.
3: The low quality public transit as the only alternative creates political pressure for better transit
It's a risky gambit, because public transit can't be made superior overnight. Really good subways and trains are the result of either legacy dumb luck from 100 years ago or once-in-a-millennium rebuilding due to war or other catastrophe. Games played with road networks to restrict cars can wind up hurting buses, which are the cheapest and fastest way to improve public transit since they require almost no fixed infrastructure.
If the larger region surrounding the car-restricted urban area is car dependent (which is nearly all of the US), the odds of a huge financial windfall to improve transit are pretty low -- people won't want to pay for massive transit upgrades.
Rather than trying to create these car-free utopias, maybe there's some better solution -- like very large parking areas on the city outskirts, combined with really fast and high quality "last mile" trams or express buses that take people to their final destination. Park and ride lots are kind of like this, but they're almost always located way out in the suburbs and aren't useful outside of explicit commuting.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like the loopholes of non-standard bluetooth profiles miss the point and are a worse problem than allowing generic bluetooth mice generally. It's happened, but it feels like some kind of weird exception.
Apple *could* have allowed BT mice, but totally ignored them in standard UI APIs, so that nothing was mouse-enabled by default and required apps to use some other UI API to obtain mouse functionality. They protect the touch UI, apps that want to enable mouse functionality gain it without going down the road of a custom mouse with some weird BT profile.
I wish we would debate immigration itself and not get stuck in the weeds discussing walls, whether drugs or illegal immigrants come over the border frontier or airports and shipping containers, or whether they're all criminals, and all the other fringe elements of the debate.
I think there are serious questions about the economic impact of high levels of impoverished immigrants. They burden school districts, local social welfare systems, low-income housing, etc. Does their very low wage employment, even in an ideal situation where they are W-2 workers, actually pay off their added economic burden, or are they actually subsidized, perhaps even for a long time -- like a generation. Or even longer, since we know that escaping poverty is hard.
Our social welfare system does a very marginal job of serving US citizens, it seems unlikely to expand sufficiently to cover significant numbers of poor migrants and serve US citizens. This seems like a real issue to me.
Then there are real questions about the US job market and corporate hiring policies for non-impoverished immigrants. Very few of them are "rock star" types, most of them are cheap filler for corporate jobs that actually seems to harm skilled US workers.
All political systems have failure points -- Belgium had trouble forming a government for some time (months) due to conflicts between the Flemish and the Walloon. Italy has had dozens of governments due to party fragmentation. Proportional representation countries wind up with minor parties acting as kingmakers, warping policy or even politics.
All of those things seem "weird" in the US. You old an election and once elected, there's not enough majority to form a government? That seems weird from a US perspective, even though the political explanations make sense.
There was an old grain elevator I saw demolished, and it took a dedicated crew of construction people with heavy equipment a couple of weeks to bring it down -- battering the concrete with a wrecking ball, then guys torching the rebar enough to get the embedded concrete to crumble.
Some of the demonstration concrete walls look really difficult to penetrate, it's not like some burlap sack filled with hand tools would be sufficient you would probably need something a lot more sophisticated and a lot more time -- concrete saws, cutting torches for rebar, and possibly hours spent attacking the wall.
Maybe a doorway or something could be cut through it in a matter of hours with concrete saws and acetylene torches, but that's non-trivial effort. And I'd wager the people who build these could use techniques that frustrate simple mechanical attacks -- steel mesh in the concrete that damage concrete saw blades, for example.
If you have to haul hundreds of pounds or more equipment and tools to attack the wall, the wall becomes more useful the more remote it is because you can't just drive up with a 1 ton pickup filled with saws and torches, you have to haul it by hand.
I can think of other factors.
One, they know that Facebook and online sharing is dominated by young people and they don't want to look "old" for not fully participating, and wind up over-participating in sharing, in trying to fit in. So it's kind of an overcompensation.
The other is generational -- older people grew in a world without instantaneous communication that relied more on person-person information sharing, whether it was just personal gossip or whether it was of a more functional nature (ie, swapping stories with fellow salesmen or something). Combine this with the often sensationalist nature of fake news, and it's not hard to see why older people who might be more sharing oriented with information anyway wind up prioritizing the most "amazing" news first.
It makes me wonder how much value there is in TV tracking data vs. the amount of resource applied to collecting it -- the software and hardware in the TV itself, the back-end data collection infrastructure, etc. I'm sure the cost addition right now is relatively low on a per set basis, but it seems like there will be an increasing demand for better data, requiring more software and maybe even more hardware to support the collection in the TV than the smart/streaming options themselves need, like some future TV that has an embedded cellular modem that makes data collection bypass even user cooperation.
It seems like there's some tipping point where the data just isn't as valuable as the resources it takes to collect it.
It also makes me wonder at what point Amazon or Netflix just comes out with their own smart TV, more heavily subsidized than the ones from a "TV" brand. You get a discount on the TV and the subscription to the sponsoring service, and in "exchange" they get super detailed viewing habits on their service as well as details on competing services.
Why the fuck hasn't Apple allowed bluetooth mice at least on an application-specific basis?
I'm mostly willing to go along with the idea why they're not allowed generically as input devices because Apple's precious touch interface would quickly get corrupted by mouse UI logic, but on a lot of apps the touch screen is totally worthless.
That would have involved looking into their own hearts to recognize the depth and depravity of greed in the technology industry.
The paranoid part of me doesn't believe Microsoft is doing this to fix the update problem at all. Instead, they're allocating 'hidden space' on the drive to capture user sensitive data and store it for later uploads to Microsoft when the laptop/desktop is connected to the Internet.
The paranoid part of me wonders if this is the start of some kind of trend where it's basically expected that some largeish portion of user-purchased hardware -- storage, compute, connectivity is expected to be given over completely to its primary software vendor to support their business model. Whether it's mining cryptocurrency, providing distributed storage, obtaining extremely local telemetry (local RF monitoring, weather monitoring, traffic/geolocation, etc) and so on.
I mean, we're already partway there. Maps applications phone home to provide traffic congestion, crypto mining (albeit mostly malware-oriented) exists, Windows 10 has its "download and provide updates to local computers" settings, etc.
Maybe it becomes like commercials, part of the expected bargain for "free" stuff, which is also largely the basis for large scale "free" internet services in exchange for personal information.
Maybe it's something you buy your way out of, at least partially -- pay for Windows Deluxe Pro, and you buy down the amount of local resources you're expected to hand over to Microsoft for their cloud computing environment.
It's awfully hard to foreclose on debt the issuer has decided to void.
The thing with SSD is that in many cases the form factor (like 2.5" disks) is big enough that you could have several terabytes of flash chips in them.
The effective size of a flash chip isn't really a huge obstacle unless you insist on the M.2 or similar form factor.
I think this is right, but the confounding factor is the extremely high number of low-end Mercedes I see anymore. I mean, like Honda Civic sized Mercedes. It used to be not that long ago that you'd mostly see S and E class Mercedes, and a very small number of C class. Now all I see are shitloads of low-end C class sedans and SUVs and very few S or E class anymore.
I don't doubt that a lot of suckers are leasing them because the interior experience is still mostly "Mercedes" and the outside has the 3 pointed star, but there are so many of them there's no exclusivity to it. Plus, they're really fucking tiny anymore. A Ford Escape or a Toyota Camry.
Maybe Mercedes have figured out they'll go broke only trying to sell S/E class cars to the dwindling number of people who can afford them or aren't buying Teslas, and they need cheaper cars to keep up their numbers. But it sure erodes the exclusivity factor.
I mean now I associate someone in a C class as not an exclusive individual, but a low-status individual trying super hard to project status they don't have. The same thing may have been true of S550 owners earlier, but it was a much more imposing statement.
Humans are social animals. Social status is almost directly correlated to physical health and is a major component of mental health.
Look what a dog will do to regain its social status -- tear through walls, walk miles, whatever it takes to get back to their pack.
I don't know what the parent poster's friend's life is like and neither do you, but she could have other aspects of her life that are so much worse off that whatever elevation in status the iPhone brings her actually compensates for the other things that drag down her social status.
Is it kind of shitty that it takes her an iPhone to gain some kind of peer acceptance? Probably, but then again, I don't know how much worse off her life would be without this group's acceptance, there may not be other social groups available or they may have other, worse, status markers she would have to obtain/endure.
Their problem was the profit trap. They were making so much profit off a single device that innovating into other products, even though they could easily afford it, was basically too risky because there's a good chance those products wouldn't have been as profitable as the phones. If you spend a billion in profits investing in a new device that only brings in 500 million in profits, you've basically lost 500 million dollars.
This holds back companies from innovating into new products or even substantially altering their existing products, as nearly any change won't return the profits it cost to deliver it.
IMHO, I think Apple's level of control over the iPhone was too great, too. They were unwilling to open up the platform very much for fear it would reduce their control of the product over the longer run. In theory an iPhone could do a lot more if there was greater hardware connectivity and software flexibility, but they've kept a lot of those innovation avenues cut off or severely restricted.
IMHO, Apple needs to more seriously look at making the iPhone the core platform of their entire computing platform, replacing low-end Macs with docks that let iPhones be the actual computer. They don't sell enough Macs at that level to really hurt them and it might allow some growth from people with iPhones and basic PC/laptop computers who won't switch to Mac computers but might be interested in a "desktop" that is driven by an iPhone. The CPU power is pretty much there for basic office productivity.
The CPC rules "uncontested" only in a symbolic way. There's over a billion people in China and a lot more than just Uncle Xi's agenda in play, both in the party, the economy and in regional areas. It's part of why China is so control-oriented because they know that any kind of national control in China is extremely tenuous.
There's has long been a lot of questions about China's economic numbers generally. Every few months there's some new initiative to reel in bad loans, stop over-production, etc. It's like people on Instagram -- there's the Instagram view of their life, and then there's the real view of their life which is a lot messier and uncertain.
Plus once the notion of economic insecurity gains traction among the population, the government's social control paranoia gets kicked into high gear. Their biggest fear may not be existential economic collapse but social upheaval caused by some kind of significant economic downturn they can't quickly reverse with internal economic policy or demand. The real genius of economic pressure on China isn't in the trade economics, it's playing on the psychology of the leadership's fear of losing social control.
And this is where China's lack of economic transparency hurts them internally; they themselves become victims of their own economic gamesmanship and sketchy economic data. It's like needing psychological help but using your Instagram self to explain your problems to the shrink.
My sense is the US gives up before they should not because they can't win, but because domestic political pressure among stakeholders affected by US policy to China causes it to shift. Dropping the tariffs will bump GDP numbers for a couple of quarters to produce "great economy" headlines to benefit politicians.
And really, "winning" is a complicated state anyway that nobody can really define. Long term concessions by the Chinese? Cutting back on state-sponsored IP theft/hacking? Simply fucking up the domestic Chinese economy enough that it causes them to shift funds from the military to prop up the economy? There's a ton of angles in play.
Since I live in Minnesota, it made complete sense to talk to someone who had panels installed on their comparably sized house.
This was a year ago or so, so I don't remember the figures but it was like a decade before they started to get that good "free" electricity due to paying off the panels.
The excess payments to pay off the panels over 10 years invested in a no-load index fund instead would have resulted in much greater return on investment that could have paid down utility costs to essentially zero and kept them there indefinitely.
I fully agree that the same setup in a warmer, sunnier state with a different electrical consumption pattern would probably shift the economics of it.
Look at it from a more real world perspective.
If you run a business, you're a known entity to the cops and as a business owner have a whole lot more credibility than someone random person who chose to ignore the "NO CASH ACCEPTED" signs.
The cops will more than likely side with the business owner and treat you like a non-paying customer, which is a crime in most places, not a "private transaction dispute". You're not trading grain futures here.
My guess is that the cops just care about the business owner not getting outright ripped off. They'd probably tell the owner to accept your cash, but probably also wouldn't require the owner to give you any change in return.
Yuck. Half the point of cooking up a 2 lb package of extra-thick bacon every so often is for filtering and saving the rendered fat for other cooking purposes.
Why do "nitrate free" products taste worse? I've been sampling both uncured (and apparently without even celery extract) and "nitrate free" (celery juice cured) breakfast meats and find both of them equally worse tasting than nitrate cured products.
I don't really get solar WITHOUT the batteries.
The people I know in Minnesota with panels literally don't see much payoff for 10-ish years. The utilities are eventually going to get their way and greatly cut their payback rate for grid buyback.
Generating and storing energy for your own use is the only thing that makes sense, but right now the economics of it for the average homeowner don't work well.
I'm sure the answer somewhere is tied to design decisions tied to security and the assumption that the user interface/computing functionality of headphone devices would always be primitive. Kind of 640K ought to be enough for everybody mindset.
But really, there's no reason that you have to give up security for added functionality. I'm pretty sure there could be a pairing/security mechanism that puts all the right keys on the right devices so they can listen to sender broadcasts.
Seriously, bluetooth is part of this problem.
Most bluetooth headphones that can pair with multiple devices have a clunky and non-standard method of switching between paired devices, often that depends with switching off bluetooth on one of them. Many can't pair with more than one device at all. Devices suck too, often not willing to output to more than one device (bluetooth or otherwise) at once.
So this means invariably unless you dedicate headphones to specific devices, your bluetooth configuration will most likely be wrong or require a bunch of intervention to get working.
I don't quite get why bluetooth (with some kind of protocol changes, most likely) couldn't be much smoother with multiple devices, allowing multi-device pairing (multicasting if you will) so your headphones could get audio from your pc, your phone, and whatever else all at the same time. And the fucking other devices should be willing to send so that all the paired receivers can receive audio.
The headphone jack problem would be a lot less bad if bluetooth worked right.
You can make buses more efficient without even increasing the number of buses by simply restricting where they will stop, say every 5 blocks vs. every block. This forces an extra 2 block walk, max, for every commuter.
Increasing buses definitely helps, but it's also expensive in terms of capital investment and fuel consumption.
Building subways was significantly easier 1900-1930 as they could use more intrusive construction like trench excavation and labor costs were a lot lower, in addition to lower costs for land acquisition.
Shanghai is an outlier because its subway was a byproduct of both crazy Chinese construction growth and a political system where there was not really room for opposition. I don't know the details of Madrid's expansion, but I suspect that it had a lot to do with cheap foreign loans that affected the Spanish economy and probably a long-term deficit in infrastructure development, which contributed to the political will.
I just don't see any of those factors leading to a massive subway system being built in the US anytime soon.
Don't forget the commuting enables labor mobility which is a massive boost to economic productivity. It'd be great if there was no commuting but you either need to have reduced labor mobility (ie, keeping less productive people in jobs) or greatly increased housing liquidity so people can move if they change jobs.
I think some of the logic of the anti-car urban factions in urban areas with poor public transit is:
1: Make driving a car difficult through reduced parking, more expensive parking, and street closures which worsen auto traffic
2: This forces drivers onto public transit.
3: The low quality public transit as the only alternative creates political pressure for better transit
It's a risky gambit, because public transit can't be made superior overnight. Really good subways and trains are the result of either legacy dumb luck from 100 years ago or once-in-a-millennium rebuilding due to war or other catastrophe. Games played with road networks to restrict cars can wind up hurting buses, which are the cheapest and fastest way to improve public transit since they require almost no fixed infrastructure.
If the larger region surrounding the car-restricted urban area is car dependent (which is nearly all of the US), the odds of a huge financial windfall to improve transit are pretty low -- people won't want to pay for massive transit upgrades.
Rather than trying to create these car-free utopias, maybe there's some better solution -- like very large parking areas on the city outskirts, combined with really fast and high quality "last mile" trams or express buses that take people to their final destination. Park and ride lots are kind of like this, but they're almost always located way out in the suburbs and aren't useful outside of explicit commuting.