Why the focus on efficiency standards, though, when usage patterns make a bigger difference? If I choose to use incandescent bulbs, and my neighbor chooses to use 5x as many CFLs which they leave on 24/7, that's a-ok by government efficiency standards, but is not saving any electricity.
I'm not talking about just passenger cars, but the entire fleet of gas-powered vehicles. I think the biggest savings is in mandating commercial vehicle improvements, actually.
And the bigger point is that when talking about energy security, oil is a much bigger problem than electricity. A big goal of electric cars is not just more efficient cars, but cars that use grid electricity instead of oil, because it can be generated more cleanly and from less geopolitically problematic sources. So starting with a 1.5% savings in electricity seems like totally the wrong place to go.
Sure, I buy the last part, I just don't get why light bulbs are unique. My neighbor choosing to ridiculously heat his house to 80 degrees also affects everyone. So do absurdly large televisions. But nobody that I know of is proposing to mandate thermostats that won't heat/cool above/below certain government-prescribed threshholds, or force people to buy more reasonably sized TVs.
I'd be okay putting a total energy budget cap on a home, with rapidly increasing prices if you use more than X kWh/month. Then let everyone choose what to spend it on. My neighbor can run his giant TV, I can run my incandescent bulbs, someone else can run their 800W gaming machine, and whatever, but if you try to run all of those, you get hammered with fees.
Of the bill, maybe, but of energy usage, it's about 12%, of a residential pie that is itself about 20% of U.S. energy usage. So residential lighting is about 2 1/2% of U.S. energy usage, and from the best category of energy usage (electricity).
I already do have the right to burn as much energy unnecessarily as I want, though. The government didn't even ban most of the bigger ones; they banned a really tiny one that seems to be mostly out of image and spite.
To use your example, driving old cars is not banned, and they're even grandfathered in from just about all newer regulations. Running an unnecessarily ridiculous 500 Watt home computer is not banned. Keeping your home air-conditioned to 72 degrees (which many peopl actually do) is not banned either. Buying a Hummer 2 to go grocery shopping isn't banned. Installing single-paned windows isn't banned. Etc., etc.
Plus in my particular case, incandescent bulbs are around 100% efficient. I live in an area with a climate that's around 50-60 most of the year, which is cool enough to need some heating, but not cold enough to be worth the expense of getting a gas furnace installed. So I use a moderate amount of electrical heating to keep it up around the mid-60s (I don't really mind it being somewhat cool). Any "waste heat" from bulbs, the stove, or the computer substitutes 1-for-1 for the electrical heater.
Of course, you could ban electrical heaters, too.;-)
Considering how miniscule a percentage of total energy usage residential light bulbs account for, it doesn't seem like a very sensible thing to regulate. (Commercial lighting is a bigger deal, and already separately regulated.) It's also using electricity, the least problematic of the energy sources from a security point of view, because it's mainly generated using U.S. sources (there's even currently a natural-gas glut).
If they really cared about energy security, they'd be going after oil usage, e.g. by raising the gas tax or mandating better fuel standards. Replacing every incandescent bulb in the U.S. won't have an effect even close to what a 5mpg increase in average fuel efficiency would have.
Is that possible? I didn't think U.S. banks would open an account for a foreign national with no U.S. social-security number or tax ID, and no U.S. mailing address.
That does seem like a good option for bigger customers, but the minimum $75/mo fee is fairly steep for smaller merchants--- $900/yr would be a pretty decent chunk of sales for many hobbyist indie-game devs (which this guy was initially, until his game unexpectedly took off).
Neither of those two options are available to merchants based in Sweden, though, so wouldn't help the Minecraft developer.
(Google Checkout isn't available to non-US/UK accounts at all, and Amazon Payments will only let you withdraw money to a linked U.S. bank account... so if you're Swedish, you could accept it, but then you'd have to spend 100% of your income on Amazon gift certificates.)
I'm on my 10th-ish PayPal account. I NEVER accept money through it. I send a GoogleCheckout invoice. Even for eBay.
Unfortunately, that isn't an option for the guy in this story, because he's Swedish, and Google Checkout is only available to U.S. and U.K. merchants. One of many reasons PayPal is still dominant.
Mostly because of either no choice or few alternatives.
For payment-only, you often have no choice, because it's what eBay and/or a particular merchant accepts. On the other hand, for payment-only it's also relatively unproblematic, because you shouldn't have large amounts of money sitting in the account that PayPal could freeze.
For accepting money, you're much more exposed to PayPal's whims, and you also have a choice of what payment processor you use. However, you don't often have many good choices. Two of its competitors are Google Checkout and Amazon's payment service, but they're much less international. PayPal supports dozens of currencies and merchants in >100 countries, while Google Checkout is limited to only merchants in the U.S. and U.K., and Amazon's payments services only allow withdrawal of funds to U.S. bank accounts (and only do transactions in U.S. dollars). Since the Minecraft developer is Swedish, neither of those are options.
Another alternative is to set up a merchant account for processing credit-card payments yourself, but you need to be a certain size for that to be a sensible option. The Minecraft guy probably is big enough now that a merchant account makes sense, but he wasn't when he started out as a random 1-man shop selling a $10 game on the internet.
Basically there is a big gap in the market for lightweight payment-acceptance services available to non-American merchants. If you're in Sweden, you have PayPal, a merchant account, accepting bank transfers directly, and mailed payments.
I think that's probably true for algorithms, but it might not be for deployed systems. Current communications devices can't use all the available theoretical techniques over all possible frequencies in all possible configurations, so there might be some significant gains on that front with new transmitters/receivers/etc. For example, most spread-spectrum systems operate over relatively narrow portions of the spectrum, at least compared to the whole electromagnetic spectrum--- nobody is spreading over everything from radio waves to x-rays, or anything close to that. Using larger parts of it has both some technical and operational challenges, since if your spread is over very large parts of the spectrum, parts of your signal are being transmitted on frequencies with extremely different properties.
For bonus points, please include "math" in the diagram.
(Unfortunately, there's no clear consensus on that one. It's interesting to look at where stats is at various universities--- sometimes it's in "math" or "applied math", other times it's in a separate dept all on its own.)
That's where the remainder goes.;-) I also used to save somewhat more--- I spend probably $24k/year now, but in my early-20s more frugal days I spend more like $18k/year, and so was able to save $10k+/year, which I put into safe investments (CDs/etc.) which at the time were yielding around 6-7%, which has altogether added a nice cushion to my savings.
I got the stats from here, which in turn cites some U.S. govt sources. In particular, it looks like about 16% of households make $100k+, and another 11% make $75k-$100k, adding up to 27% making $75k+.
I do live in California--- Santa Cruz. Maybe San Diego is 30% more? I mean, you can spend $1500 for a 1-bd house on a cliff with an ocean view here, but if you're willing to settle for no ocean view, $1k is pretty doable.
The Bay Area, actually, which I'm led to believe is one of the more expensive housing areas--- I live in Santa Cruz. It's not on the beach, and has no ocean view, but it's a short walk to the beach.
Man, you must know mostly well-off people! Most families I know are not making $75k, and no single people I know are making that much, and nobody feels anything close to poor. A household income of $75k is, according to some census stats, 73rd percentile: i.e. 27% of people make more, and 73% make less. If being in the richest 27% of Americans makes you feel poor, you must have a pretty inflated notion of "middle class"...
I personally make around $35k as a young single person with no debt, and feel rich, fwiw. I can't even spend it all--- after $1k/month on rent for a nice apt near the beach, and another $1k on food/car/entertainment, my expenses are pretty much covered.
the mortgage and HOA fees of living on the upper east side or UWS, the nanny or the crazy elite day care there is very little left
Isn't that kind of how it works? "After I spent all my money on expensive luxuries, I found I had spent it!" Next you'll be telling me that Silicon Valley techies can barely make ends meet on their $120k salaries after the payments on that Porsche...
Man, if $75k is poverty in NYC then 2/3 of NYC lives in poverty! Is it really the case that only the top third of New Yorkers can be said to be non-poor?
(The median income for the city is $48k, fwiw. Even for Manhattan, the median is $65k.)
I believe the study found $75,000 was a cutoff for families, not specifically for single people. My guess is that the cutoff for single people, especially young single people without large university debts, and especially if they don't live in SF or NYC, is rather lower.
Sometimes it's easier and faster to code from scratch than it is to use off-the shelf software - especially in the age of "frameworks".
I like this take on it: redundancy is bad, but the primary way of avoiding redundancy, factoring things out into libraries or frameworks, introduces dependencies, which are also bad. Which is worse? Depends, but I think dependencies are worse in more cases than people believe. I personally like to depend on something only when it's a big enough chunk of code to be worth adding a dependency for, has a clean API, and has an active and interested maintainer.
You can generally opt out of class-action settlements, yes. But since the settlement was for a lump sum, not a per-class-member calculation, people opting out won't really make any difference, though I guess it could have a PR impact if a huge number of people did.
The usual reason people opt out of class action settlements is actually the opposite: they want to retain their right to sue separately, whereas if you accept the settlement, any future claims for the same issue are barred.
Don't be too hard on the guy. Snoop Dogg is something of a victim of his own success here. What's he going to do to follow up cameos in a Kate Perry video, and doing publicity stunts to promote Facebook games? When the bar's set that high, you've really got to hustle for opportunities. And don't think he can just appear in some computer ad, either, because his fellow gangsta rapper Dr. Dre is already doing HP ads. No, he's really got to go all out, and find something totally square to promote for cash. Stay in school is a bit played out, and "don't do drugs" is out of the question, but this is a perfect opportunity. Hey kids, don't break into computers! Your pal Snoopy wouldn't!
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Why the focus on efficiency standards, though, when usage patterns make a bigger difference? If I choose to use incandescent bulbs, and my neighbor chooses to use 5x as many CFLs which they leave on 24/7, that's a-ok by government efficiency standards, but is not saving any electricity.
I'm not talking about just passenger cars, but the entire fleet of gas-powered vehicles. I think the biggest savings is in mandating commercial vehicle improvements, actually.
And the bigger point is that when talking about energy security, oil is a much bigger problem than electricity. A big goal of electric cars is not just more efficient cars, but cars that use grid electricity instead of oil, because it can be generated more cleanly and from less geopolitically problematic sources. So starting with a 1.5% savings in electricity seems like totally the wrong place to go.
Sure, I buy the last part, I just don't get why light bulbs are unique. My neighbor choosing to ridiculously heat his house to 80 degrees also affects everyone. So do absurdly large televisions. But nobody that I know of is proposing to mandate thermostats that won't heat/cool above/below certain government-prescribed threshholds, or force people to buy more reasonably sized TVs.
I'd be okay putting a total energy budget cap on a home, with rapidly increasing prices if you use more than X kWh/month. Then let everyone choose what to spend it on. My neighbor can run his giant TV, I can run my incandescent bulbs, someone else can run their 800W gaming machine, and whatever, but if you try to run all of those, you get hammered with fees.
Of the bill, maybe, but of energy usage, it's about 12%, of a residential pie that is itself about 20% of U.S. energy usage. So residential lighting is about 2 1/2% of U.S. energy usage, and from the best category of energy usage (electricity).
I already do have the right to burn as much energy unnecessarily as I want, though. The government didn't even ban most of the bigger ones; they banned a really tiny one that seems to be mostly out of image and spite.
To use your example, driving old cars is not banned, and they're even grandfathered in from just about all newer regulations. Running an unnecessarily ridiculous 500 Watt home computer is not banned. Keeping your home air-conditioned to 72 degrees (which many peopl actually do) is not banned either. Buying a Hummer 2 to go grocery shopping isn't banned. Installing single-paned windows isn't banned. Etc., etc.
Plus in my particular case, incandescent bulbs are around 100% efficient. I live in an area with a climate that's around 50-60 most of the year, which is cool enough to need some heating, but not cold enough to be worth the expense of getting a gas furnace installed. So I use a moderate amount of electrical heating to keep it up around the mid-60s (I don't really mind it being somewhat cool). Any "waste heat" from bulbs, the stove, or the computer substitutes 1-for-1 for the electrical heater.
Of course, you could ban electrical heaters, too. ;-)
Considering how miniscule a percentage of total energy usage residential light bulbs account for, it doesn't seem like a very sensible thing to regulate. (Commercial lighting is a bigger deal, and already separately regulated.) It's also using electricity, the least problematic of the energy sources from a security point of view, because it's mainly generated using U.S. sources (there's even currently a natural-gas glut).
If they really cared about energy security, they'd be going after oil usage, e.g. by raising the gas tax or mandating better fuel standards. Replacing every incandescent bulb in the U.S. won't have an effect even close to what a 5mpg increase in average fuel efficiency would have.
Is that possible? I didn't think U.S. banks would open an account for a foreign national with no U.S. social-security number or tax ID, and no U.S. mailing address.
That does seem like a good option for bigger customers, but the minimum $75/mo fee is fairly steep for smaller merchants--- $900/yr would be a pretty decent chunk of sales for many hobbyist indie-game devs (which this guy was initially, until his game unexpectedly took off).
Neither of those two options are available to merchants based in Sweden, though, so wouldn't help the Minecraft developer.
(Google Checkout isn't available to non-US/UK accounts at all, and Amazon Payments will only let you withdraw money to a linked U.S. bank account... so if you're Swedish, you could accept it, but then you'd have to spend 100% of your income on Amazon gift certificates.)
Unfortunately, that isn't an option for the guy in this story, because he's Swedish, and Google Checkout is only available to U.S. and U.K. merchants. One of many reasons PayPal is still dominant.
Mostly because of either no choice or few alternatives.
For payment-only, you often have no choice, because it's what eBay and/or a particular merchant accepts. On the other hand, for payment-only it's also relatively unproblematic, because you shouldn't have large amounts of money sitting in the account that PayPal could freeze.
For accepting money, you're much more exposed to PayPal's whims, and you also have a choice of what payment processor you use. However, you don't often have many good choices. Two of its competitors are Google Checkout and Amazon's payment service, but they're much less international. PayPal supports dozens of currencies and merchants in >100 countries, while Google Checkout is limited to only merchants in the U.S. and U.K., and Amazon's payments services only allow withdrawal of funds to U.S. bank accounts (and only do transactions in U.S. dollars). Since the Minecraft developer is Swedish, neither of those are options.
Another alternative is to set up a merchant account for processing credit-card payments yourself, but you need to be a certain size for that to be a sensible option. The Minecraft guy probably is big enough now that a merchant account makes sense, but he wasn't when he started out as a random 1-man shop selling a $10 game on the internet.
Basically there is a big gap in the market for lightweight payment-acceptance services available to non-American merchants. If you're in Sweden, you have PayPal, a merchant account, accepting bank transfers directly, and mailed payments.
I think that's probably true for algorithms, but it might not be for deployed systems. Current communications devices can't use all the available theoretical techniques over all possible frequencies in all possible configurations, so there might be some significant gains on that front with new transmitters/receivers/etc. For example, most spread-spectrum systems operate over relatively narrow portions of the spectrum, at least compared to the whole electromagnetic spectrum--- nobody is spreading over everything from radio waves to x-rays, or anything close to that. Using larger parts of it has both some technical and operational challenges, since if your spread is over very large parts of the spectrum, parts of your signal are being transmitted on frequencies with extremely different properties.
For bonus points, please include "math" in the diagram.
(Unfortunately, there's no clear consensus on that one. It's interesting to look at where stats is at various universities--- sometimes it's in "math" or "applied math", other times it's in a separate dept all on its own.)
That's where the remainder goes. ;-) I also used to save somewhat more--- I spend probably $24k/year now, but in my early-20s more frugal days I spend more like $18k/year, and so was able to save $10k+/year, which I put into safe investments (CDs/etc.) which at the time were yielding around 6-7%, which has altogether added a nice cushion to my savings.
I got the stats from here, which in turn cites some U.S. govt sources. In particular, it looks like about 16% of households make $100k+, and another 11% make $75k-$100k, adding up to 27% making $75k+.
I do live in California--- Santa Cruz. Maybe San Diego is 30% more? I mean, you can spend $1500 for a 1-bd house on a cliff with an ocean view here, but if you're willing to settle for no ocean view, $1k is pretty doable.
The Bay Area, actually, which I'm led to believe is one of the more expensive housing areas--- I live in Santa Cruz. It's not on the beach, and has no ocean view, but it's a short walk to the beach.
Man, you must know mostly well-off people! Most families I know are not making $75k, and no single people I know are making that much, and nobody feels anything close to poor. A household income of $75k is, according to some census stats, 73rd percentile: i.e. 27% of people make more, and 73% make less. If being in the richest 27% of Americans makes you feel poor, you must have a pretty inflated notion of "middle class"...
I personally make around $35k as a young single person with no debt, and feel rich, fwiw. I can't even spend it all--- after $1k/month on rent for a nice apt near the beach, and another $1k on food/car/entertainment, my expenses are pretty much covered.
Isn't that kind of how it works? "After I spent all my money on expensive luxuries, I found I had spent it!" Next you'll be telling me that Silicon Valley techies can barely make ends meet on their $120k salaries after the payments on that Porsche...
Man, if $75k is poverty in NYC then 2/3 of NYC lives in poverty! Is it really the case that only the top third of New Yorkers can be said to be non-poor?
(The median income for the city is $48k, fwiw. Even for Manhattan, the median is $65k.)
I believe the study found $75,000 was a cutoff for families, not specifically for single people. My guess is that the cutoff for single people, especially young single people without large university debts, and especially if they don't live in SF or NYC, is rather lower.
I like this take on it: redundancy is bad, but the primary way of avoiding redundancy, factoring things out into libraries or frameworks, introduces dependencies, which are also bad. Which is worse? Depends, but I think dependencies are worse in more cases than people believe. I personally like to depend on something only when it's a big enough chunk of code to be worth adding a dependency for, has a clean API, and has an active and interested maintainer.
You can generally opt out of class-action settlements, yes. But since the settlement was for a lump sum, not a per-class-member calculation, people opting out won't really make any difference, though I guess it could have a PR impact if a huge number of people did.
The usual reason people opt out of class action settlements is actually the opposite: they want to retain their right to sue separately, whereas if you accept the settlement, any future claims for the same issue are barred.
I have been saving up for new cows.
Don't be too hard on the guy. Snoop Dogg is something of a victim of his own success here. What's he going to do to follow up cameos in a Kate Perry video, and doing publicity stunts to promote Facebook games? When the bar's set that high, you've really got to hustle for opportunities. And don't think he can just appear in some computer ad, either, because his fellow gangsta rapper Dr. Dre is already doing HP ads. No, he's really got to go all out, and find something totally square to promote for cash. Stay in school is a bit played out, and "don't do drugs" is out of the question, but this is a perfect opportunity. Hey kids, don't break into computers! Your pal Snoopy wouldn't!