Your comment makes no sense. Uber will only really take off when self-driving cars become mandatory.
SDCs would destroy Uber's business model.
Their entire business model is predicated on "not a taxi company, a rideshare Schelling Point company".
If they owned their own SDCs, they would immediately *actually* be a taxi company; it's the fact that they do *NOT* own a fleet of cars that makes their contracted drivers contractors, rather than employees.
It also means that the could afford to drop $1.6M to boot every taxi cab in Paris, making the hated "taxi cab traffic slowdowns" go away for a week, and gaining MUCH love among everyone but the taxis, who already hate their guts anyway.
It means they could spend $12.2M to set up every Uber driver with a Delaware Ride Contracting Corp., and deal with the contracting corps instead of dealing with the drivers, to ensure that they are *NOT* in a legal grey area with regard to employee status. Yes, they are employees... of one of a million Delaware S corps which THEN contract driving services to Uber... which ONLY employs contractors.
It means that they could spend $8.6M, and set up a wholly owned subsidiary that sells franchises to people who want to be drivers for "$1 and other valuable considerations", and then charges per unit plus a percentage for use of their scheduling network. And THEN they still ONLY employ contractors.
There's a lot of ways out of the regulatory mire of being considered a taxi service -- but owning a fleet is NOT one of them.
Simple way to avoid the problem on Macs... don't load BootCamp, and you won't have SMM on the systems you load under bootcamp.
Mac OS X itself doesn't use SMM. Instead, it uses a PE (Platform Expert) module that loaded as part of the OS, which knows in detail about the hardware platform it's going to be running on. Without bootcamp, there's not even ACPI support, since power management is implemented in a much more discrete level of steps than the 4 which ACPI provides.
But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it costs you to get rid of it.
NO.
It *does NOT* cost me to get rid of it.
I *MAKE* money when I get rid of a data center, because I *RECOVER* some of my sunk costs. People will happily pay me for my electronic components and materials that they are able to recover post recycling. My real estate has increased in value. The capitol improvements I made to the property still have value.
Why do you *insist* that I am not recovering any of my sunk costs when I get rid of a data center?!?!? These damn things are not like nuclear superfund cleanup sites; they contain *valuable* raw materials, even ignoring all other value to the location, such as its *demonstrated* access to large amounts of electrical power from multiple sources, and so on.
The idea that it costs me a *DAMN* thing to decommission a data center is ignorant, misguided, and indicates that you are looking at an opportunity as if it were a problem.
You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan.
My plan is: "There is a net positive margin of about 6% between what I plan to sell the datacenter to the scrap dealer, and what the scrap deal will make on it, considering only net present value". Therefore, my decommissioning costs are fixed, and give me a net positive income, and the scrap company also gets a net positive income.
Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.
Don't be an idiot; if that were my plan, I'd just put the thing in a holding company in the first place, spin it off at the last minute, and let the holding company go bankrupt. That way I'd have clean hands. That assumes that the data center contents at decommission time have zero value.
I deny that the data center contents at decommission time would have zero value.
You keep dropping into the supply chain and talking about raw materials. That is totally irrelevant to the business we are discussing, unless you are suggesting that the business you are in is doing all of these things. If you are going to buy your servers from Dell or HP, all you need to know is how much the servers will cost you to buy, maintain, and get rid of when they are useless someday.
Google does not buy their servers from Dell. Google builds their own motherboards.
So yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.
In addition, when it comes to cloud computing, one of the ways that old school hardware companies are monetizing the hardware that no one is buying from them, is to put them into a data center, and sell cloud hosting services on top of it. This is, in fact, one of IBM's big cloud strategy components.
So once again, yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.
I know of very few companies engaged in building out large data centers, which are also stupid enough to let someone else do the work for them.
For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center....
Quit including "and decommission", and we can have a reasonable cost discussion. Otherwise, you are talking future value of materials used in the construction of the data center, and future costs of electronic recycling programs, and so on. And those can change drastically over a very few years.
At issue is that a lot of the materials, particularly copper and rare earths, are commodity traded materials, and their value can fluctuate wildly as a result. As was seen by people breaking into buildings to rip out copper pipes. As we saw, when Sumitomo Corporation's Yasuo Hamanaka attempted to corner the copper market between 1986 and 1996, leading to a drastic ten year run up in copper prices. He eventually was in control of 5% of the entire copper market in the world.
The only things that actually matter are "purchase" (sunk costs) and "run" (ongoing costs).
Parking minimums have been determined to be a bad idea - They promote sprawl and increases property prices (because now every property has to include land to park x cars)
Then build up, not out.
Yes, I know: you are not allowed to build over 4 stories in San Francisco without a city planning meeting, a "view impact assessment", and a number of other stupid things. So fine: live with the sprawl.
Ain't Prop 13 great, if you are a beneficiary of the Kaiser Family Trust, and own enough commercial property?
Except that you're wrong. If you buy/trade a majority share of the company that owns commercial property then the tax basis is reassessed. While it is true Gallo family was able to avoid reassessment on some vineyards by having individual members of the family buy less than a 50% stake in the company that owned the property, this could easily be fixed.
Which is why you put the commercial property into a REIT, and then sell shares in the REIT, with strict limits on the transaction amounts to preclude majority shares being owned by a single company. Duh!
Prop 13 allows older people who are on a fixed income to continue to own their property. My parents would have to leave the state of California if prop 13 did not exist.
This was the stated intent of proper 13, and if the Kaiser Family Trust and several other large real estate investors, including one former California governor, had not lobbied for the inclusion of commercial property ("But think of housing rentals!") within the scope of prop 13 -- without limiting its inclusion *solely* to housing -- at the last minute, before the ballots went to press, we would not be in the current mess.
This is, BTW, the same reason China has "ghost cities": they are warehousing value where it can not be taxed, and then trading it like trading cards.
In case this was NOT crystal clear to you... this is NOT about building actual houses that anyone would ever want to live in, or commercial office space that anyone would ever consider renting, it's about dicking around with the income tax laws to shelter profits from taxation.
This is also why you have to build such big-ass buildings: in order to hide your big-ass profits as paper losses.
Your article is talking about housing. I am talking about commercial office space. Vacancy rates for office space in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley in general are sitting around 13% as of April of this year:
You really *don not want* to invest in housing, since some idiot *WILL* rent that, and then you're stuck with controls on how quickly you are allowed to raise the rents on them. Commercial rents have no such controls, and therefore a lot less risk, if you need your tenants out so that you can intentionally lose money for tax purposes.
Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.
Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.
You don't need to pump it inside, and you don't need to pump it through anything but PVC. In other words, all you have to do is get it from the cold spot in the ocean to the heat exchangers, and then back out into the ocean.
Cities are actually demanding less parking spaces. Here in Ottawa, Canada a condo unit is going up by me. The city may not approve it unless they reduce the number of spaces available. This is to reduce traffic and encourage public transit. The city is rezoning to build up and not spread out for the same reasons.
This is also done in San Francisco.
Although, the reason is actually that they don't need the parking, because the building is going to remain mostly unoccupied.
The way this works, is you buy a building with a certain theoretical value for rent per square foot, and then you don't rent it out, because no one will pay such an insane amount of rent, and so you get to write the "lost income" off your taxes. You generally have a holding company own the build, and own the holding company instead.
Then you trade buildings like baseball cards with other billionaires, so that whoever is wiling to pay the most for a given tax writeoff gets to own the building that year. This lets you move assets and income around with relatively high liquidity, while at the same time taking the tax write-downs when they make the most sense. This works out because you're selling the company that owns the building, rather than selling the actual building, so the tax basis on the building never changes. Ain't Prop 13 great, if you are a beneficiary of the Kaiser Family Trust, and own enough commercial property?
Usually, you build these tax shelters in areas that were previously parking lots, although in there's a nice spot that used to be a green area, you can usually bribe your way into replacing it with a building, as long as you (1) promise that it's a "green" building, (2) promise to put plants on the roof (eventually), and (3) promise to contribute to the "right" campaigns for some time into the future.
It's very rare, but it occasionally happens that you have to also agree to build some low income housing somewhere, as well, usually some place highly undesirable, like over top of a Thorium Plume in the groundwater from an old General Atomics facility in the area that used to be the Navy Yard. But you can also write that off as part of your initial "sunk cost", so it's OK.
P.S.: This is mostly not a joke; this is how it works, except everyone knows the General Atomics Thorium plume lives under the townhouse down in Mountain View, at the intersection of U.S. 85 and U.S. 101, which is why the deed covenants require that you let the EPA come in and examine the monitoring equipment in your downstairs no less than every two years.
Then they came for my job, and no one was left to defend me.
Alas you are thinking far too simply my friend. We are approaching a point where automation will potentially render a sizable portion of the population unemployable because a machine can do their job just as well, if not better and for a lesser cost in a world where Humans Need Not Apply
So, instead, I became an artist, and lived off my Universal Basic Income, which was granted to me by the abundance created by automation of all the drudge jobs.
Well, except for Bill, in Passaic New Jersey, who has to press the red "there are still humans on the planet, please keep the light on" button every morning so that the robot factories don't shut down. Bill also wants to be an artist, but, no, he has to press the red button once a day. He's very unhappy that he's the only human left with an actual job, but... frankly, Bill has always been a whiner, ever since we took away his red Swingline Stapler.
Unless you happy to be one of those roboenablers who are seeking to bring about the robotic apocalypse... in which case I say: "Well played sir!"
I'll *happily* build the S.O.B.'s, at least until they get to the point where they can build themselves... I'll even buy Bill a new stapler.
Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.
Google just turns the thermostat up to 80, and has its data center techs wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The equipment doesn't fail any faster.
Also, I was totally stymied by the supposed need for desalination, given that Google happily uses salt water in the cooling systems in several of its data centers; it's not like the computers care that the water be potable.
Finally, I agree that some places need desalination plants -- it's just: those places are not data centers, they're agricultural areas. For example, there's 80 billion gallons of water flooding 600,000 acres of laser-leveled rice paddys to a depth of 5 inches for growing rice in Sacramento Valley alone; in addition, it takes another 4 billion gallons each day to replace losses due to evaporation. China has similar issues, due to rice being a staple grain there, as well. It's not for the data centers.
Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.
Well, given that no matter how you're measuring it, the fact that materials were mined, and refined, and processed, and transported, and all of this involved an expenditure of energy in the first place, you've irrecoverably contributed to the entropy of the universe.
So I'm not sure what you are asking, unless it's that we account for all entropic costs for all human activity, including accounting for the accounting for the entropic costs. Which is, of course, an absurd standard to hold anyone to, since metabolic processes are, themselves, entropic.
So, we are not asking whether people are or aren't entropy whores, we're merely haggling about the price, aren't we?
The issue you purport to be concerned about, namely "breaking and entering", carries its own penalties. If police are "getting sick and tired" of prosecuting people for that, perhaps they ought to look around for alternative employment.
But that's not what they did: they increased the penalties to the point that such breaking and entering and criminal trespass was more costly to the activist than engaging in fraud would be. The fraud was an escalation tactic on the part of the activists.
The counter-escalation to this fraud was to enact the laws that the judge has claimed are unconstitutional, but which probably aren't, so that the costs to the activists for engaging in the behaviour would result in penalties equivalent to the breaking and entering and criminal trespass.
If the activists actually cared, they would not be trying to take illegal shortcuts.
They would join the Department of Agriculture and the Departments of Health as spot inspectors.
Yeah, this would require that they become educated in animal husbandry, which they also oppose; but if the farms were acting illegally, it's a lot easier to work from within the system, with legally obtained government credentials, than it is to continue to break the laws, and hope an activist judge will "help you out" when you get in trouble, and then hope their ruling sticks on appeal.
Because 1) government is corrupt. In Idaho, the gov are a bunch ag people themselves.
[...]
"Resorted to fraud" - just listen to you. These concerned individuals wanted to document what actually happens. How else can you do it? How else do you stop the torture?
The absolutely easiest and most correct, and most obvious, way to do it would be for you to become part of the regulatory infrastructure.
The non-corrupt part.
And then you hold them accountable, if, in fact, the factory farms are engaged in any illegal behaviour.
These factory farms are not going to stop torturing animals unless they are forced to do so.
If you cannot record what actually happens, then how would anybody know?
You would trust that your Department of Agriculture, and you local Health Department, are doing their jobs, and if they are doing their jobs, then the treatment of the animals is no worse than the fact that people intend to eat them at some point.
I could not find any info about recent bombings in Texas that were the cause of Planned Parenthood clinics for closing. Why would anyone bomb a clinic if they closed because of the stricter Texas law?
Because the U.S. Supreme court blocked enforcement of the admitting privileges provisions of HB 2 on 29 Jun 2015, in a 5-4 vote, reversing the appeals court ruling, at least temporarily. Your inability to do research is is not an indicator of you being right.
2) Your 2nd answer doesn't answer my question. Why did the clinics close if they could not conduct abortions anymore due to the stricter Texas law?
Actually, it was the revocation of both the clinic licenses and the doctors licenses that resulted in the man (but not all) the clinics closure. Others were due to the bomb threats in the statistics noted above (the law passed in 2013).
The loss of the licenses was engineered by anti-choice advocates opposed to abotion, and was managed as an intimidation and threat campaign, and as a letter writing campaign to hospital boards in various areas.
This was done by tracking doctors and patients license plate numbers. Due to this pattern of intimidation, even the clinics that were able to maintain services found that they had no customers, and that women were traveling out of state to Kansas, Oklahoma, and sometimes as far as Missouri for medical treatment.
Except of course, poor women who could not afford the travel expenses. Mostly, they just had to stay pregnant, and have babies they couldn't afford to raise, with no recourse, and somewhat extensive medical expenses, which are normally associated with having babies.
Why couldn't they still stay open to provide the necessary women health services?
Because they lost their licenses to operate, and it's illegal to practice medicine without a license... even in Texas.
Ugh, don't give this asshole more traffic. I think there's a reason few people are linking to his blog directly. He released the details of this bug without even attempting to contact Apple.
It is not big deal, Chicken Little...
If you looked at his LinkedIn profile -- assuming you have access because you are a close enough contact -- Stefan Esser is a first degree contact with Aaron Sigel, who is the Manager in OS Security at Apple. He's also a first degree contact with Alex Ionescu, who used to work on iPhone until 2011 (the same year I left Apple), and of course, I know Stefan through various forums, and from my tenure on the Core OS Kernel team at Apple (I was there 8 years).
So yes, Apple had to have known about this prior to the general disclosure.
In my time at Apple, this is typically not something Apple would issue a security update over. Specifically local shell privilege escalations are typically not considered an issue, since if you have access to the hardware, you can own it anyway.
While layered attacks are getting more common, the specific attack in the wild has to do with a click monkey installer permitting the use of a non-local developer key signature on a compromised installer, as opposed to something code signed by the Apple App Store. Further, it requires a settings change (which you've probably already made, if you are a developer, or get third party apps directly), coupled with an explicit install authorization using an "admin" account.
In other words: it's not a big deal, and is in fact rather "ho-hum" compared to, for example, the last 7 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities. It's *NOT* a "drive by attack", where if you just go to a web site with a Yahoo Ad on it, and no "Click To Flash" and no "Click To Run Plugins" settings, you're p0wned.
all that adware and spyware will still be present and enabled by default,
What malware? Please point me to concrete evidence of this as I have yet to see it.
I believe that's a reference to what they disable that used to work, and the bandwidth stealing.
The things that get ripped out from under you are:
(1) Windows Media Center (2) DVD Playback (3) Desktop gadgets (4) Preinstalled games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts; you have to purchase replacements) (5) USB Floppy drive support (6) The OneDrive application from Windows Essentials (it's replaced instead with the sync application) (7) Windows Updates are forced on you instead of being optional, unless you pay more for Pro or Enterprise
We've seen this already with the consistent installation of the Windows 10 Update tray icon and application, even on Windows 7 and 8. This is particularly insidious, since the application runs in the background, and acts as a torrent style replication server as part of their Windows 10 content delivery network used for the updates. Basically, they are stealing bandwidth from you, even if you do not opt in for the update.
Microsoft calls this "feature" Windows Update Delivery Optimization, and your computer is basically eating into your bandwidth cap, if you have on, since about July 29th when the update was released. This is enabled by default for the Home and Pro versions (but not Enterprise or Education, apart from the local network).
To disable it, you have to go to the "Settings" / "Update & Security" / "Windows Update" / "Advanced Options" / "CHOOSE HOW UPDATES ARE DELIVERED", and then turn the "Updated from More than One Place" from "on" to "Off".
And yeah, I think if something is eating into my bandwidth cap, it counts as "malware". The other problem is that it tends to monopolize upload bandwidth, which is usually asymmetric with download -- mean that it eats all of your ability to ACK your full download bandwidth.
The other thing that I'd count as "malware" is Wi-Fi Sense, which shares your Wi-Fi password with various email and social network contacts. But it doesn't allow you to pick and choose with which ones it's shared, so for every enabled network, it's "everyone on this social network in my contacts, not just family or close friends".... also: kinda not cool.
Again: trun-offable, but on by default: "Windows Settings" / "Network & Internet" / "Change Wi-Fi settings"/"Manage Wi-Fi settings" then turn off all the items under Wi-Fi Sense. Then have Wi-Fi Sense (and JUST THAT) "forget the list of known networks".
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Your comment makes no sense. Uber will only really take off when self-driving cars become mandatory.
SDCs would destroy Uber's business model.
Their entire business model is predicated on "not a taxi company, a rideshare Schelling Point company".
If they owned their own SDCs, they would immediately *actually* be a taxi company; it's the fact that they do *NOT* own a fleet of cars that makes their contracted drivers contractors, rather than employees.
It also means that the could afford to drop $1.6M to boot every taxi cab in Paris, making the hated "taxi cab traffic slowdowns" go away for a week, and gaining MUCH love among everyone but the taxis, who already hate their guts anyway.
It means they could spend $12.2M to set up every Uber driver with a Delaware Ride Contracting Corp., and deal with the contracting corps instead of dealing with the drivers, to ensure that they are *NOT* in a legal grey area with regard to employee status. Yes, they are employees... of one of a million Delaware S corps which THEN contract driving services to Uber... which ONLY employs contractors.
It means that they could spend $8.6M, and set up a wholly owned subsidiary that sells franchises to people who want to be drivers for "$1 and other valuable considerations", and then charges per unit plus a percentage for use of their scheduling network. And THEN they still ONLY employ contractors.
There's a lot of ways out of the regulatory mire of being considered a taxi service -- but owning a fleet is NOT one of them.
You mean like that the next value after that is 91958?
And the one after that 3402408?
}B^)
Number of arrangements of n circles in the affine plane:
1, 1, 3, 14, 168, ...
If anyone cares, the next number in this sequence is 3172. And no, I did not brute force it, I examined the problem symmetry.
Simple way to avoid the problem on Macs... don't load BootCamp, and you won't have SMM on the systems you load under bootcamp.
Mac OS X itself doesn't use SMM. Instead, it uses a PE (Platform Expert) module that loaded as part of the OS, which knows in detail about the hardware platform it's going to be running on. Without bootcamp, there's not even ACPI support, since power management is implemented in a much more discrete level of steps than the 4 which ACPI provides.
"What if someone changed their timezone... and none of the OS vendors in the world cooperated by updating their zone files to include the new zone?"
If no one changes their zone info files, it didn't happen, right?
But that doesn't change what I'm saying... There is a specific cost involved in setting up a data center. Then it costs you money to operate the thing, plus it costs you to get rid of it.
NO.
It *does NOT* cost me to get rid of it.
I *MAKE* money when I get rid of a data center, because I *RECOVER* some of my sunk costs. People will happily pay me for my electronic components and materials that they are able to recover post recycling. My real estate has increased in value. The capitol improvements I made to the property still have value.
Why do you *insist* that I am not recovering any of my sunk costs when I get rid of a data center?!?!? These damn things are not like nuclear superfund cleanup sites; they contain *valuable* raw materials, even ignoring all other value to the location, such as its *demonstrated* access to large amounts of electrical power from multiple sources, and so on.
The idea that it costs me a *DAMN* thing to decommission a data center is ignorant, misguided, and indicates that you are looking at an opportunity as if it were a problem.
Obviously, not everyone will buy one... for example, I can't see Indiana Jones owning one.
You simply have to at least think about decommissioning costs, if you are going to be responsible in your business plan.
My plan is: "There is a net positive margin of about 6% between what I plan to sell the datacenter to the scrap dealer, and what the scrap deal will make on it, considering only net present value". Therefore, my decommissioning costs are fixed, and give me a net positive income, and the scrap company also gets a net positive income.
Sure, you can ignore these costs and just plan to go bankrupt and let your creditors and share holders clean up the mess but I don't feel that is ethical and just going out of business is generally not the desired situation.
Don't be an idiot; if that were my plan, I'd just put the thing in a holding company in the first place, spin it off at the last minute, and let the holding company go bankrupt. That way I'd have clean hands. That assumes that the data center contents at decommission time have zero value.
I deny that the data center contents at decommission time would have zero value.
You keep dropping into the supply chain and talking about raw materials. That is totally irrelevant to the business we are discussing, unless you are suggesting that the business you are in is doing all of these things. If you are going to buy your servers from Dell or HP, all you need to know is how much the servers will cost you to buy, maintain, and get rid of when they are useless someday.
Google does not buy their servers from Dell. Google builds their own motherboards.
So yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.
In addition, when it comes to cloud computing, one of the ways that old school hardware companies are monetizing the hardware that no one is buying from them, is to put them into a data center, and sell cloud hosting services on top of it. This is, in fact, one of IBM's big cloud strategy components.
So once again, yes, the business I am in *IS* doing all those things.
I know of very few companies engaged in building out large data centers, which are also stupid enough to let someone else do the work for them.
For Pete's sake... I'm talking about ACCOUNTING here. What does it cost in dollars, or rubles, or bit coin to purchase, run and decommission the data center....
Quit including "and decommission", and we can have a reasonable cost discussion. Otherwise, you are talking future value of materials used in the construction of the data center, and future costs of electronic recycling programs, and so on. And those can change drastically over a very few years.
At issue is that a lot of the materials, particularly copper and rare earths, are commodity traded materials, and their value can fluctuate wildly as a result. As was seen by people breaking into buildings to rip out copper pipes. As we saw, when Sumitomo Corporation's Yasuo Hamanaka attempted to corner the copper market between 1986 and 1996, leading to a drastic ten year run up in copper prices. He eventually was in control of 5% of the entire copper market in the world.
The only things that actually matter are "purchase" (sunk costs) and "run" (ongoing costs).
Parking minimums have been determined to be a bad idea - They promote sprawl and increases property prices (because now every property has to include land to park x cars)
Then build up, not out.
Yes, I know: you are not allowed to build over 4 stories in San Francisco without a city planning meeting, a "view impact assessment", and a number of other stupid things. So fine: live with the sprawl.
Ain't Prop 13 great, if you are a beneficiary of the Kaiser Family Trust, and own enough commercial property?
Except that you're wrong. If you buy/trade a majority share of the company that owns commercial property then the tax basis is reassessed. While it is true Gallo family was able to avoid reassessment on some vineyards by having individual members of the family buy less than a 50% stake in the company that owned the property, this could easily be fixed.
Which is why you put the commercial property into a REIT, and then sell shares in the REIT, with strict limits on the transaction amounts to preclude majority shares being owned by a single company. Duh!
Prop 13 allows older people who are on a fixed income to continue to own their property. My parents would have to leave the state of California if prop 13 did not exist.
This was the stated intent of proper 13, and if the Kaiser Family Trust and several other large real estate investors, including one former California governor, had not lobbied for the inclusion of commercial property ("But think of housing rentals!") within the scope of prop 13 -- without limiting its inclusion *solely* to housing -- at the last minute, before the ballots went to press, we would not be in the current mess.
This is, BTW, the same reason China has "ghost cities": they are warehousing value where it can not be taxed, and then trading it like trading cards.
In case this was NOT crystal clear to you... this is NOT about building actual houses that anyone would ever want to live in, or commercial office space that anyone would ever consider renting, it's about dicking around with the income tax laws to shelter profits from taxation.
This is also why you have to build such big-ass buildings: in order to hide your big-ass profits as paper losses.
This is also done in San Francisco.
Although, the reason is actually that they don't need the parking, because the building is going to remain mostly unoccupied.
What a steaming load of bullshit:
"As of the fourth quarter of 2014, the vacancy rate in San Francisco stood at just 3.6%"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/erincarlyle/2015/04/16/san-francisco-tops-forbes-2015-list-of-worst-cities-for-renters/
Your article is talking about housing. I am talking about commercial office space. Vacancy rates for office space in both San Francisco and Silicon Valley in general are sitting around 13% as of April of this year:
http://www.bizjournals.com/san...
That's about 3.6X the vacancy rate for residential rentals.
This is up from 11.36% office vacancy rates in San Francisco for mid 2012: http://nainorcal.com/SF_Office...
You really *don not want* to invest in housing, since some idiot *WILL* rent that, and then you're stuck with controls on how quickly you are allowed to raise the rents on them. Commercial rents have no such controls, and therefore a lot less risk, if you need your tenants out so that you can intentionally lose money for tax purposes.
Salt water is hella corrosive. It's really not about potable water, it's about water which wants to eat through most anything.
Now, I have no idea what Google has salt water contained in, but having lived in coastal areas and visited coastal areas ... salt water pretty much eats everything near it even if it isn't in direct contact.
You don't need to pump it inside, and you don't need to pump it through anything but PVC. In other words, all you have to do is get it from the cold spot in the ocean to the heat exchangers, and then back out into the ocean.
Here's the video that tells what they did in 2011: http://www.tomshardware.com/ne...
Cities are actually demanding less parking spaces. Here in Ottawa, Canada a condo unit is going up by me. The city may not approve it unless they reduce the number of spaces available. This is to reduce traffic and encourage public transit. The city is rezoning to build up and not spread out for the same reasons.
This is also done in San Francisco.
Although, the reason is actually that they don't need the parking, because the building is going to remain mostly unoccupied.
The way this works, is you buy a building with a certain theoretical value for rent per square foot, and then you don't rent it out, because no one will pay such an insane amount of rent, and so you get to write the "lost income" off your taxes. You generally have a holding company own the build, and own the holding company instead.
Then you trade buildings like baseball cards with other billionaires, so that whoever is wiling to pay the most for a given tax writeoff gets to own the building that year. This lets you move assets and income around with relatively high liquidity, while at the same time taking the tax write-downs when they make the most sense. This works out because you're selling the company that owns the building, rather than selling the actual building, so the tax basis on the building never changes. Ain't Prop 13 great, if you are a beneficiary of the Kaiser Family Trust, and own enough commercial property?
Usually, you build these tax shelters in areas that were previously parking lots, although in there's a nice spot that used to be a green area, you can usually bribe your way into replacing it with a building, as long as you (1) promise that it's a "green" building, (2) promise to put plants on the roof (eventually), and (3) promise to contribute to the "right" campaigns for some time into the future.
It's very rare, but it occasionally happens that you have to also agree to build some low income housing somewhere, as well, usually some place highly undesirable, like over top of a Thorium Plume in the groundwater from an old General Atomics facility in the area that used to be the Navy Yard. But you can also write that off as part of your initial "sunk cost", so it's OK.
P.S.: This is mostly not a joke; this is how it works, except everyone knows the General Atomics Thorium plume lives under the townhouse down in Mountain View, at the intersection of U.S. 85 and U.S. 101, which is why the deed covenants require that you let the EPA come in and examine the monitoring equipment in your downstairs no less than every two years.
Then they came for my job, and no one was left to defend me.
Alas you are thinking far too simply my friend. We are approaching a point where automation will potentially render a sizable portion of the population unemployable because a machine can do their job just as well, if not better and for a lesser cost in a world where Humans Need Not Apply
So, instead, I became an artist, and lived off my Universal Basic Income, which was granted to me by the abundance created by automation of all the drudge jobs.
Well, except for Bill, in Passaic New Jersey, who has to press the red "there are still humans on the planet, please keep the light on" button every morning so that the robot factories don't shut down. Bill also wants to be an artist, but, no, he has to press the red button once a day. He's very unhappy that he's the only human left with an actual job, but ... frankly, Bill has always been a whiner, ever since we took away his red Swingline Stapler.
Unless you happy to be one of those roboenablers who are seeking to bring about the robotic apocalypse... in which case I say: "Well played sir!"
I'll *happily* build the S.O.B.'s, at least until they get to the point where they can build themselves... I'll even buy Bill a new stapler.
Water use certainly is an environmental impact factor ... if the data center is located somewhere where water is scarce. If the metric doesn't take into account where the center is located when evaluating externalities, then it's not really doing its job. Sure, blowing through millions of gallons a month is a problem in California, but in upstate New York it's not really an issue.
Google just turns the thermostat up to 80, and has its data center techs wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts. The equipment doesn't fail any faster.
Also, I was totally stymied by the supposed need for desalination, given that Google happily uses salt water in the cooling systems in several of its data centers; it's not like the computers care that the water be potable.
Finally, I agree that some places need desalination plants -- it's just: those places are not data centers, they're agricultural areas. For example, there's 80 billion gallons of water flooding 600,000 acres of laser-leveled rice paddys to a depth of 5 inches for growing rice in Sacramento Valley alone; in addition, it takes another 4 billion gallons each day to replace losses due to evaporation. China has similar issues, due to rice being a staple grain there, as well. It's not for the data centers.
Compare them using the REAL metric, total life cycle costs...How much does it cost to buy, operate and dismantle your data center when it's usefulness is over... That's the REAL question.
Well, given that no matter how you're measuring it, the fact that materials were mined, and refined, and processed, and transported, and all of this involved an expenditure of energy in the first place, you've irrecoverably contributed to the entropy of the universe.
So I'm not sure what you are asking, unless it's that we account for all entropic costs for all human activity, including accounting for the accounting for the entropic costs. Which is, of course, an absurd standard to hold anyone to, since metabolic processes are, themselves, entropic.
So, we are not asking whether people are or aren't entropy whores, we're merely haggling about the price, aren't we?
The issue you purport to be concerned about, namely "breaking and entering", carries its own penalties. If police are "getting sick and tired" of prosecuting people for that, perhaps they ought to look around for alternative employment.
But that's not what they did: they increased the penalties to the point that such breaking and entering and criminal trespass was more costly to the activist than engaging in fraud would be. The fraud was an escalation tactic on the part of the activists.
The counter-escalation to this fraud was to enact the laws that the judge has claimed are unconstitutional, but which probably aren't, so that the costs to the activists for engaging in the behaviour would result in penalties equivalent to the breaking and entering and criminal trespass.
If the activists actually cared, they would not be trying to take illegal shortcuts.
They would join the Department of Agriculture and the Departments of Health as spot inspectors.
Yeah, this would require that they become educated in animal husbandry, which they also oppose; but if the farms were acting illegally, it's a lot easier to work from within the system, with legally obtained government credentials, than it is to continue to break the laws, and hope an activist judge will "help you out" when you get in trouble, and then hope their ruling sticks on appeal.
Because 1) government is corrupt. In Idaho, the gov are a bunch ag people themselves.
[...]
"Resorted to fraud" - just listen to you. These concerned individuals wanted to document what actually happens. How else can you do it? How else do you stop the torture?
The absolutely easiest and most correct, and most obvious, way to do it would be for you to become part of the regulatory infrastructure.
The non-corrupt part.
And then you hold them accountable, if, in fact, the factory farms are engaged in any illegal behaviour.
These factory farms are not going to stop torturing animals unless they are forced to do so.
If you cannot record what actually happens, then how would anybody know?
You would trust that your Department of Agriculture, and you local Health Department, are doing their jobs, and if they are doing their jobs, then the treatment of the animals is no worse than the fact that people intend to eat them at some point.
1) what bombings?
http://prochoice.org/wp-conten...
I could not find any info about recent bombings in Texas that were the cause of Planned Parenthood clinics for closing. Why would anyone bomb a clinic if they closed because of the stricter Texas law?
Because the U.S. Supreme court blocked enforcement of the admitting privileges provisions of HB 2 on 29 Jun 2015, in a 5-4 vote, reversing the appeals court ruling, at least temporarily. Your inability to do research is is not an indicator of you being right.
2) Your 2nd answer doesn't answer my question. Why did the clinics close if they could not conduct abortions anymore due to the stricter Texas law?
Actually, it was the revocation of both the clinic licenses and the doctors licenses that resulted in the man (but not all) the clinics closure. Others were due to the bomb threats in the statistics noted above (the law passed in 2013).
The loss of the licenses was engineered by anti-choice advocates opposed to abotion, and was managed as an intimidation and threat campaign, and as a letter writing campaign to hospital boards in various areas.
This was done by tracking doctors and patients license plate numbers. Due to this pattern of intimidation, even the clinics that were able to maintain services found that they had no customers, and that women were traveling out of state to Kansas, Oklahoma, and sometimes as far as Missouri for medical treatment.
Except of course, poor women who could not afford the travel expenses. Mostly, they just had to stay pregnant, and have babies they couldn't afford to raise, with no recourse, and somewhat extensive medical expenses, which are normally associated with having babies.
Why couldn't they still stay open to provide the necessary women health services?
Because they lost their licenses to operate, and it's illegal to practice medicine without a license... even in Texas.
Ugh, don't give this asshole more traffic. I think there's a reason few people are linking to his blog directly. He released the details of this bug without even attempting to contact Apple.
It is not big deal, Chicken Little...
If you looked at his LinkedIn profile -- assuming you have access because you are a close enough contact -- Stefan Esser is a first degree contact with Aaron Sigel, who is the Manager in OS Security at Apple. He's also a first degree contact with Alex Ionescu, who used to work on iPhone until 2011 (the same year I left Apple), and of course, I know Stefan through various forums, and from my tenure on the Core OS Kernel team at Apple (I was there 8 years).
So yes, Apple had to have known about this prior to the general disclosure.
In my time at Apple, this is typically not something Apple would issue a security update over. Specifically local shell privilege escalations are typically not considered an issue, since if you have access to the hardware, you can own it anyway.
While layered attacks are getting more common, the specific attack in the wild has to do with a click monkey installer permitting the use of a non-local developer key signature on a compromised installer, as opposed to something code signed by the Apple App Store. Further, it requires a settings change (which you've probably already made, if you are a developer, or get third party apps directly), coupled with an explicit install authorization using an "admin" account.
In other words: it's not a big deal, and is in fact rather "ho-hum" compared to, for example, the last 7 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities. It's *NOT* a "drive by attack", where if you just go to a web site with a Yahoo Ad on it, and no "Click To Flash" and no "Click To Run Plugins" settings, you're p0wned.
all that adware and spyware will still be present and enabled by default,
What malware? Please point me to concrete evidence of this as I have yet to see it.
I believe that's a reference to what they disable that used to work, and the bandwidth stealing.
The things that get ripped out from under you are:
(1) Windows Media Center
(2) DVD Playback
(3) Desktop gadgets
(4) Preinstalled games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts; you have to purchase replacements)
(5) USB Floppy drive support
(6) The OneDrive application from Windows Essentials (it's replaced instead with the sync application)
(7) Windows Updates are forced on you instead of being optional, unless you pay more for Pro or Enterprise
We've seen this already with the consistent installation of the Windows 10 Update tray icon and application, even on Windows 7 and 8. This is particularly insidious, since the application runs in the background, and acts as a torrent style replication server as part of their Windows 10 content delivery network used for the updates. Basically, they are stealing bandwidth from you, even if you do not opt in for the update.
Microsoft calls this "feature" Windows Update Delivery Optimization, and your computer is basically eating into your bandwidth cap, if you have on, since about July 29th when the update was released. This is enabled by default for the Home and Pro versions (but not Enterprise or Education, apart from the local network).
To disable it, you have to go to the "Settings" / "Update & Security" / "Windows Update" / "Advanced Options" / "CHOOSE HOW UPDATES ARE DELIVERED", and then turn the "Updated from More than One Place" from "on" to "Off".
And yeah, I think if something is eating into my bandwidth cap, it counts as "malware". The other problem is that it tends to monopolize upload bandwidth, which is usually asymmetric with download -- mean that it eats all of your ability to ACK your full download bandwidth.
The other thing that I'd count as "malware" is Wi-Fi Sense, which shares your Wi-Fi password with various email and social network contacts. But it doesn't allow you to pick and choose with which ones it's shared, so for every enabled network, it's "everyone on this social network in my contacts, not just family or close friends".... also: kinda not cool.
Again: trun-offable, but on by default: "Windows Settings" / "Network & Internet" / "Change Wi-Fi settings" /"Manage Wi-Fi settings" then turn off all the items under Wi-Fi Sense. Then have Wi-Fi Sense (and JUST THAT) "forget the list of known networks".
For an even bigger contrast, think of what would happen if Carly Fiorina were in charge at Apple in 1999. Or even Larry Ellison.
Technically, Larry Ellison was on the board of directors of Apple from 1997 through 2002. So he *was*, at least partially in charge of Apple in 1999.