Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that, say, Visa knows the contents of your receipt - I left it vague at "companies". But in my case, I use the company credit to get the 5% discounts - so it's true that Target tracks me perfectly, Lowes tracks me perfectly, and as you point out any store with a loyalty card tracks me perfectly. Hell, even my local co-op tracks my purchases perfectly. Stores without loyalty cards can still get a rough idea of who is buying what by keeping track of which payment cards you use. Companies can then buy and sell these lists to one another to improve their optics.
It's true that we are far from an all-seeing eye kind of scenario - but it's also true that we are far from a cash-transaction, anonymous kind of scenario.
The problem is that it's very hard to recruit people to a cause that doesn't affect them in a tangible way. Sure, companies are selling data about you and sure, they know everything you purchase and where and when you purchase it. But none of that has any impact on people's day-to-day lives where you can point to it and say, there, there is the problem.
They're just ENGINES. Just ONE component of the entire car.
That's an incredibly naive view. Sorry to be harsh, but you come off sounding like an expert and I don't think people should consider you one. The drivetrain is what the entire car is designed around, and the attributes (shape, weight, etc) of the drivetrain are driven by the engine technology. Toyota has been making the Camry since the early 80s, with incremental improvements over 35 years. An electric version would need to be a ground-up redesign. From a manufacturing standpoint, it would be no big deal. But from an engineering and logistics standpoint, going electric is a huge undertaking.
In simple terms, an electrified Camry would be a terrible car and would flop in the market. An electric Toyota needs to be a ground-up redesign.
Pigeonhole me if it makes you feel better, but a lot of 50-something people I know who found themselves jobless during the recession had a major attitude adjustment after learning that they were competing with the going rate, not their old salary. They are all re-employed now, but it was rough for them. I'm not sure why someone who is 52 should make more than someone who is 22 just because they have put in more years - the only important things are what skills do they have, are they a good worker, etc... Experience is likely to be a feather in their cap if it is in the right thing.
If you still have some value as an employee, someone will hire you. You might not be worth your starting salary compounded annually at 3%, which is what people seem to expect.
The process of air going into a vacuum causes the air to spread out and separate by velocity. The further you go down the tube from a hole, the more gradual and broad the wave of incoming air gets.
I have to plead ignorance on the exact makeup of this "front" of air. Whether it is a "shockwave" or simply a tremendously rapid change in pressure, a lot of engineering needs to go into planning for this failure mode. It will require valves such as you describe, which will add non-trivially to the cost of the system. Remember that most detractors aren't claiming that the hyperloop is "impossible" - they are claiming that it is not economically viable. The huge vacuum system is just going to be a major engineering nightmare with costs which reflect that. This thing is competing against air travel, where the "tube" is free.
True, but with a traditional railroad a break in the tracks will kill one train-ful of people, not everyone traveling along the entire track system. A large-ish break in the tube would cause a shockwave to travel through the tube (an "air wall", in your vernacular) until it hits every vehicle. There are ways to mitigate this - for instance, you can have vents all along the tube that could actuate ahead of the shockwave. A smart system could gradually open the vents furthest from the break and more immediately open the vents closer to the break. The vehicles could emergency brake or even accelerate in the direction of the shock wave to reduce the impact. The system could be designed to "waste" space in the tube for air bypass so that the shockwave could partially bypass the passenger car.
In any case, this opens up another challenge - does the entire system really become unusable if any one part is damaged?
Whether or not Google is a monopoly is besides the point - the answer to a monopoly is not "more monopoly", the answer is to enforce anti-trust laws. We can discuss whether or not to take action against Google/Facebook/etc, but that action shouldn't be to create an even more powerful monopoly to take them on. We don't need that; we already have it - it's called the government.
On the other hand, Universal Studios has nearly perfected the art of combining a moving car with large, 3D halls to create very fun rides. It's very interesting to ride the various attractions of varying ages - it basically lets you see the progress over the last 20 or so years.
And several other companies have figured out how to give a pretty-good "4D" ride in a smaller, cheaper venue. Those theaters with the interactive seats and 3D screens have gotten much better over the last few years, and computers have gotten good enough to make them individually interactive. I just played a game at Niagara Falls (Canadian side) where my family and a perhaps 30 other people all stuffed into a theater to shoot zombies. The theater kept track of all our scores, took pictures of us while playing, and then reported the winner and all the other scores complete with pictures. The next step would be for the individual zombies to interact directly with the people shooting at them, but it was pretty fun as is. Anyway, based on all of the brand new 3D rides I've been seeing, I don't think it is going anywhere. It can give people a cheap thrill with much less investment and upkeep than a crappy fairground thrill ride that would require more space.
A challenge for the libertarian ideology is when our technology is not sufficiently advanced to protect individuals, and yet lives are on the line nonetheless. Vaccines currently fit this description. Most vaccines only work if some high percentage of the populous is vaccinated. Vaccines are not 100% safe. Therefore, we deliberately harm a few individuals in order to save a far greater number. I would much prefer if we could stick to libertarian principles and make it a personal decision, but to do so would render ineffective one of the greatest technologies that humans have ever developed. I'm sorry, but you need to bend your ideology at that point and accept the reality of the situation. The EM spectrum is a similar, but less stark version of this conundrum - the way our technology works is fundamentally opposed to the libertarian ideology... it requires involuntary cooperation. There are actually a fair number of examples of this kind of thing. Libertarian ideology is great at protecting us from active interference in our natural rights. It has trouble extending to (admittedly fairly rare) situations where cooperation is the enabling part of a solution.
Yeah - and I say this as someone whose base-ideology is libertarian - attempts to extrapolate our inherent rights to include property just don't hold up. I part ways with most libertarians because they take this step, and then use it to justify capitalism as an extension of our fundamental rights as human beings. I don't buy it, and view free markets as a useful tool - technology invented by man to align price and demand. You can, in principle, have your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Singapore even though the government owns 85% of the island. They emulate many of the benefits of individual home ownership by entering into transferable, extremely long-term leases in government-built apartment blocks. Which, if you think about it is very similar to what happens here under a different name - property taxes.
In any event, in the digital age we don't need kludges like prerecorded music with dynamic range compression. First of all, it assumes everyone's primary music environment is the car. My 15 minute commute barely affords me 3 or 4 songs. Second, the nicer car stereos (and premium cars) do background noise compensation, so people who care about their car audio already have solutions. Finally, I mean, it just sounds like ass - why would you advocate for this crappy sound?
OK, there are two questions here: 1. Does money influence elections and, 2. Can you buy an election.
The answer to #1 is obviously yes. The answer to #2 is, it depends.
You are right that the people spending the money only care about #2. Sometimes their money is well spent, sometimes it is not. I would very much like it to never be well spent. In fact I would like to stop them from spending it.
No, cost is not a problem. The circuit is trivial and the trick can likely already be pulled off with the DSP electronics already present for tone control/equalization. This was even available in the analog days as a "loudness" knob.
"Adoption" would happen more or less immediately if the music wasn't already compressed. It was widely adopted in ye olden days.
The last few cars that I've owned boosted the volume as you sped up or slowed down. This is a much better technical solution than ramming saturated music down everyone's throats.
And even my old-ass Sony tube TV has a dynamic range compression feature to help watch movies at low volume.
OK, but you are changing the goal posts on me here, unless you want to claim that there aren't close elections where the winning side had the monetary advantage. Senate races, for example.
I'll tell you my use-case and then you can be as judgy as you want.
I have an 11-year-old. Before a long road trip or plane ride, she makes a YouTube playlist. We use a tool to convert the entire playlist into music files (MP3?) and load them on her tablet for the ride. Quality is unimportant, as the headphones are a $10 pair from Walgreens and the ambient conditions are either a car or airplane.
I have a similar use-case for when my wife goes jogging.
Personally, I tend to use iTunes to keep my music organized and SubSonic to serve it to my various devices. My music tends to be either legit or ripped from usenet, but I'm not above grabbing a hard-to-find track from YouTube.
Your conflation of people's freedoms and companies' freedoms is worrying to me. This is the thought process that brought us Citizen's United. I'm asking you to take a step back and see that the whole stack is rotten, not just this one incident (that by the way is not yet an incident, just a theoretical thing that might maybe happen, like nuclear war). I think Sanders was an economical retard, but I would have voted for him in the hopes of getting an Amendment banning corporate and union money from politics. Corporations are not people and they should not have any natural rights - only rights specifically granted to them under corporate charters and laws.
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Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that, say, Visa knows the contents of your receipt - I left it vague at "companies". But in my case, I use the company credit to get the 5% discounts - so it's true that Target tracks me perfectly, Lowes tracks me perfectly, and as you point out any store with a loyalty card tracks me perfectly. Hell, even my local co-op tracks my purchases perfectly. Stores without loyalty cards can still get a rough idea of who is buying what by keeping track of which payment cards you use. Companies can then buy and sell these lists to one another to improve their optics.
It's true that we are far from an all-seeing eye kind of scenario - but it's also true that we are far from a cash-transaction, anonymous kind of scenario.
Then I didn't make my point very well.
How does that affect me?
The problem is that it's very hard to recruit people to a cause that doesn't affect them in a tangible way. Sure, companies are selling data about you and sure, they know everything you purchase and where and when you purchase it. But none of that has any impact on people's day-to-day lives where you can point to it and say, there, there is the problem.
They're just ENGINES. Just ONE component of the entire car.
That's an incredibly naive view. Sorry to be harsh, but you come off sounding like an expert and I don't think people should consider you one. The drivetrain is what the entire car is designed around, and the attributes (shape, weight, etc) of the drivetrain are driven by the engine technology. Toyota has been making the Camry since the early 80s, with incremental improvements over 35 years. An electric version would need to be a ground-up redesign. From a manufacturing standpoint, it would be no big deal. But from an engineering and logistics standpoint, going electric is a huge undertaking.
In simple terms, an electrified Camry would be a terrible car and would flop in the market. An electric Toyota needs to be a ground-up redesign.
Pigeonhole me if it makes you feel better, but a lot of 50-something people I know who found themselves jobless during the recession had a major attitude adjustment after learning that they were competing with the going rate, not their old salary. They are all re-employed now, but it was rough for them. I'm not sure why someone who is 52 should make more than someone who is 22 just because they have put in more years - the only important things are what skills do they have, are they a good worker, etc... Experience is likely to be a feather in their cap if it is in the right thing.
Five months and you're a programmer?
No, you become a boot.
If you still have some value as an employee, someone will hire you. You might not be worth your starting salary compounded annually at 3%, which is what people seem to expect.
The process of air going into a vacuum causes the air to spread out and separate by velocity. The further you go down the tube from a hole, the more gradual and broad the wave of incoming air gets.
I have to plead ignorance on the exact makeup of this "front" of air. Whether it is a "shockwave" or simply a tremendously rapid change in pressure, a lot of engineering needs to go into planning for this failure mode. It will require valves such as you describe, which will add non-trivially to the cost of the system. Remember that most detractors aren't claiming that the hyperloop is "impossible" - they are claiming that it is not economically viable. The huge vacuum system is just going to be a major engineering nightmare with costs which reflect that. This thing is competing against air travel, where the "tube" is free.
True, but with a traditional railroad a break in the tracks will kill one train-ful of people, not everyone traveling along the entire track system. A large-ish break in the tube would cause a shockwave to travel through the tube (an "air wall", in your vernacular) until it hits every vehicle. There are ways to mitigate this - for instance, you can have vents all along the tube that could actuate ahead of the shockwave. A smart system could gradually open the vents furthest from the break and more immediately open the vents closer to the break. The vehicles could emergency brake or even accelerate in the direction of the shock wave to reduce the impact. The system could be designed to "waste" space in the tube for air bypass so that the shockwave could partially bypass the passenger car.
In any case, this opens up another challenge - does the entire system really become unusable if any one part is damaged?
Whether or not Google is a monopoly is besides the point - the answer to a monopoly is not "more monopoly", the answer is to enforce anti-trust laws. We can discuss whether or not to take action against Google/Facebook/etc, but that action shouldn't be to create an even more powerful monopoly to take them on. We don't need that; we already have it - it's called the government.
Um, I went to engineering school and got a B.S., not a B.A.
In any event, you know what I meant and I'm not really interested in debating semantics.
On the other hand, Universal Studios has nearly perfected the art of combining a moving car with large, 3D halls to create very fun rides. It's very interesting to ride the various attractions of varying ages - it basically lets you see the progress over the last 20 or so years.
And several other companies have figured out how to give a pretty-good "4D" ride in a smaller, cheaper venue. Those theaters with the interactive seats and 3D screens have gotten much better over the last few years, and computers have gotten good enough to make them individually interactive. I just played a game at Niagara Falls (Canadian side) where my family and a perhaps 30 other people all stuffed into a theater to shoot zombies. The theater kept track of all our scores, took pictures of us while playing, and then reported the winner and all the other scores complete with pictures. The next step would be for the individual zombies to interact directly with the people shooting at them, but it was pretty fun as is. Anyway, based on all of the brand new 3D rides I've been seeing, I don't think it is going anywhere. It can give people a cheap thrill with much less investment and upkeep than a crappy fairground thrill ride that would require more space.
My point stands in Missouri, where this "entrepreneur" can hire a single engineer and maybe one liberal arts degree. Maybe.
Does that allow you to even hire a single engineer (with overhead) in the valley?
A challenge for the libertarian ideology is when our technology is not sufficiently advanced to protect individuals, and yet lives are on the line nonetheless. Vaccines currently fit this description. Most vaccines only work if some high percentage of the populous is vaccinated. Vaccines are not 100% safe. Therefore, we deliberately harm a few individuals in order to save a far greater number. I would much prefer if we could stick to libertarian principles and make it a personal decision, but to do so would render ineffective one of the greatest technologies that humans have ever developed. I'm sorry, but you need to bend your ideology at that point and accept the reality of the situation. The EM spectrum is a similar, but less stark version of this conundrum - the way our technology works is fundamentally opposed to the libertarian ideology... it requires involuntary cooperation. There are actually a fair number of examples of this kind of thing. Libertarian ideology is great at protecting us from active interference in our natural rights. It has trouble extending to (admittedly fairly rare) situations where cooperation is the enabling part of a solution.
Yeah - and I say this as someone whose base-ideology is libertarian - attempts to extrapolate our inherent rights to include property just don't hold up. I part ways with most libertarians because they take this step, and then use it to justify capitalism as an extension of our fundamental rights as human beings. I don't buy it, and view free markets as a useful tool - technology invented by man to align price and demand. You can, in principle, have your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in Singapore even though the government owns 85% of the island. They emulate many of the benefits of individual home ownership by entering into transferable, extremely long-term leases in government-built apartment blocks. Which, if you think about it is very similar to what happens here under a different name - property taxes.
Of the clan LLC on the isle of Corporatosia.
You are right that "loudness" controls don't really do DRC, but only the cheapest only boosted bass.
In any event, in the digital age we don't need kludges like prerecorded music with dynamic range compression. First of all, it assumes everyone's primary music environment is the car. My 15 minute commute barely affords me 3 or 4 songs. Second, the nicer car stereos (and premium cars) do background noise compensation, so people who care about their car audio already have solutions. Finally, I mean, it just sounds like ass - why would you advocate for this crappy sound?
OK, there are two questions here:
1. Does money influence elections and,
2. Can you buy an election.
The answer to #1 is obviously yes. The answer to #2 is, it depends.
You are right that the people spending the money only care about #2. Sometimes their money is well spent, sometimes it is not. I would very much like it to never be well spent. In fact I would like to stop them from spending it.
No, cost is not a problem. The circuit is trivial and the trick can likely already be pulled off with the DSP electronics already present for tone control/equalization. This was even available in the analog days as a "loudness" knob.
"Adoption" would happen more or less immediately if the music wasn't already compressed. It was widely adopted in ye olden days.
The last few cars that I've owned boosted the volume as you sped up or slowed down. This is a much better technical solution than ramming saturated music down everyone's throats.
And even my old-ass Sony tube TV has a dynamic range compression feature to help watch movies at low volume.
OK, but you are changing the goal posts on me here, unless you want to claim that there aren't close elections where the winning side had the monetary advantage. Senate races, for example.
I'll tell you my use-case and then you can be as judgy as you want.
I have an 11-year-old. Before a long road trip or plane ride, she makes a YouTube playlist. We use a tool to convert the entire playlist into music files (MP3?) and load them on her tablet for the ride. Quality is unimportant, as the headphones are a $10 pair from Walgreens and the ambient conditions are either a car or airplane.
I have a similar use-case for when my wife goes jogging.
Personally, I tend to use iTunes to keep my music organized and SubSonic to serve it to my various devices. My music tends to be either legit or ripped from usenet, but I'm not above grabbing a hard-to-find track from YouTube.
They are now considered so via Citizen's United.
Thus my comment about the Sanders amendment?
Perception is not reality. Reality is reality.
Thus my support for the Sanders amendment.
Your conflation of people's freedoms and companies' freedoms is worrying to me. This is the thought process that brought us Citizen's United. I'm asking you to take a step back and see that the whole stack is rotten, not just this one incident (that by the way is not yet an incident, just a theoretical thing that might maybe happen, like nuclear war). I think Sanders was an economical retard, but I would have voted for him in the hopes of getting an Amendment banning corporate and union money from politics. Corporations are not people and they should not have any natural rights - only rights specifically granted to them under corporate charters and laws.