The actually experience is different. Amazon reports that as they have grown bigger with more diverse offerings, the top drivers of revenue are shrinking. This is true if one is looking at a category (i.e. books) or as a whole. It looks like everybody has to buy the Harry Potter books, everybody will be buying a ticket to the next Star Wars film, etc.
From my observation, part of the reason for fewer items driving a greater percentage of the revenue is this: given three options for shampoo, I can try each of them and then reliably purchase my favorite. In a large population, we probably differ on what our favorite is. Given a hundred shampoos, once I find one that works decently, I'll stick with it; it's not worth it to me to try 90+ other shampoos. Replace shampoo with movie genre or book author, add in reviewer ratings so that we buy products that are reviewed more than untested and unreviewed products, and that's your Amazon experience.
Land line providers charge extra for long distance.
This is one of the biggest differences between the US and most other places in the world. I'm 36, from the UK, and remember long distance charges on landlines, but only just. Now just about all national calls from a landline are essentially free.
That's partly because the UK is less than the size of one US state, Oregon, whose population is under 4 million persons. You pack more than twice that many persons in London alone. When we say long distance, we mean long distance.
To your credit, when you say "a long time ago," you mean a long time ago.
And it's cool for Intel if it gets others thinking, "What could I do with a Galileo or Edison?" Maybe someone puts sensors under his bottles of liquor, to know if anyone has taken them off the shelf temporarily... or a new home security system, helping you confirm that all windows are shut at night... possibilities are endless if you start to think about it.
And this box lets you know who it was that didn't put it back, without spending a bunch of time to visually inventory every time it's taken out. (And don't assume visual inventories are perfect either...)
My bet is that a production toolbox has more than 6 tools, and I sure as heck don't count all the sockets in my socket set when I pull it out. It's reliable because I'm the only one who uses it. But if I shared it with three other folks working other shifts, how do I expect them to remember, "Which of you used the 10mm socket?"
There's probably some lost time too, besides the cost of the tools. If they have to walk across their football-sized factory to get another whosit, it's a productivity cost, and that can add up. If they eliminate time spent at the start and end of day checking tool boxes for accurate contents, more time savings = more money savings.
I didn't know that the study had specifically taken kids from broken homes and compared them against kids from intact homes. If you can point me to that info, I'll happily concede that the study has too few controls to be clearly identifying results about identical versus fraternal twins.
I would expect that well-cared-for kids from wealthy families would be more likely to have the opportunity to develop great drawing skills than those from poor homes where art supplies are a scarce luxury. But absent some clear methodological gap and failure to control for some variation between siblings (Rich Girl A got art lessons while her identical sister B got soccer lessons, or Poor Boy C received a scholarship to an inner-city after-school art program while his twin sister D had to wash dishes at a restaurant), I don't understand what besides genetics would drive a difference in demonstrated artistic ability between siblings.
The end of the article however jumps over to the recent flawed study that goes back to eugenics (one of many out of the UK in the last 2 years). That study claims that identical twins can draw pictures more similarly than fraternal twins, therefor genes are the key factor in a persons natural ability to draw. This study is flawed as they obviously ignore every other possible impact on a person's ability to draw a picture, and simply claim "genetics".
Please explain what are the other impacts on a person's ability to draw a picture. The primary difference between identical twins and fraternal twins is genetics. Each family may choose how much to treat its children identically versus differently, but that is a very complex item likely orthogonal to genetics.
Transient Occupancy Taxes are generally higher, for exactly that reason. And note that TOTs are not normally set at the state level but instead at the city level.
Fear and cost held me back for a long while too. Then I had kids and found myself crouching low, turning upside down, glasses moving as I looked under things to find lost pacifiers, being unable to see the one-year-old crawling on my tummy while I lay on my back, or was caught off guard by little fingers approaching me from the side of my glasses -- it became a safety hazard and I signed up quickly. Rarely regretted it. Maybe once a month, I wake with the physical feeling that there's something in my eye. It tears up for 10-15 minutes. But I can see better, without fingerprint smudges and eyebrow grease and dust on my glasses; the nosepads are never out of alignment nor do the earpieces cause aches. I look and feel different. It is weird in a sense to see so many years of photos of me with glasses, but I like being glasses-free.
I got LASIK. Now I can buy a $10 pair of sunglasses rather than get prescription sunglasses, wear eye protection in the woodshop, and walk indoors on a cold day without losing my vision temporarily to fogging lenses.
It's been standard knowledge for home gardeners that growing just one thing (e.g. tomatoes or carrots) in a certain space makes it easy for the bugs that feed on it to find it, but if you mix things up then the pests are confused and less successful. To protect against plant-specific pests, put a variety of things together in your garden: flowers, herbs, vegetables. The good pollinators like honeybees will love it; the carrot fly and tomato hornworm moth will have a much harder time finding the carrots and tomatoes to land on and lay their eggs.
Match.com's press release includes a hilarious "heat map listing where the smartest singles live," by mapping where Ivy League grads live. Apparently graduates of Stanford, U Chicago, CalTech, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, etc. aren't as smart. More likely, they're just not as rich and historically connected to Daddy's alma mater.
http://blog.match.com/wp-conte...
And those cloudbotnets are probably the ones that send me 100 spam per day, and write Buzzfeed headlines like "10 Most Gorgeous Actresses of the 1990s."
Does this mean that if Marvell delays paying CMU for 50 years, they'll only pay an additional 7%? Compared to the rate of inflation, that's a marvelous deal.
Based on Amazon reviews which say they had this book since the 1980s, it is probably this book: "The Starving Students' Cookbook" by Dede Hall. Another option is "The Impoverished Student's Book of Cookery, Drinkery and Housekeepery," available at the Reed College Bookstore online.
it's uncommon to find cereals with less than 150 calories per 1 oz serving.
Not sure how your math works. At 4 calories per gram for carbs and protein, a 1 oz / 28 gram serving is ~110 calories. It's true for Count Chocula and for Special K both. You can't reach 150 calories unless the cereal contains 8 grams of fat, which is a pretty greasy cereal. More likely you're including the milk in your numbers.
I agree that basic cable TV can be a reasonable expense, compared to other entertainment options. Taking a family of four to one movie per month can cost $40, depending on the details. At the same time, the extended packages with the premium sports channels etc. can approach $150/month, at which point it is clearly a luxury.
But if you can feed a family of four on non-organic food for $4800/year, that's 662 hours at minimum wage, or 13 hours/week. I don't take taxes out of that hourly wage, because a family of four that earns minimum wage qualifies for EITC rather than paying federal income taxes.
I would like to know if anyone is aware of a good training/education program (or book) to help folks understand how to cook healthy inexpensive meals that are not too complex (time-consuming) and decently flavorful. I think that would help bridge the gap, and I'd gladly get involved with such a program as my schedule allows.
The author Michael Pollan has a simple set of 3 rules for managing your nutrition: 1. Eat food*; 2. Not too much; 3. Mostly plants.
* What he means by this is "real" food, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that constitute the bulk of the American diet. He has a simple rule for identifying real food: If you've ever seen it advertised on TV, it's probably not real food.
Since I don't watch TV, how do I know what is advertised on TV versus what is "real food"?
Lets see them budget the cost of not having to build peaking plants and extra full power plants as renewables slow the need for growth.
Accounting works both ways:)
In the long run, you're correct. In the short run, sadly, my local electricity company applies for a rate increase to cover the depreciation on an already-existing peaking plant that is not being used at full capacity. And it's not limited to electricity. When we conserved water due to a drought, the water utility applied for rate increases, because we were not using enough water. But when we use lots of water, do they offer us a rebate? No, I think not!
I don't object to a fair "base rate" that actually covers the maintenance overhead; seems fair to pay that even if you're a net seller to the utility.
That much is perfectly fine, but why should a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by, say, 5 kWh per day by means of installing solar batteries be treated differently than a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by 5 kWh per day by means of buying more energy-saving home appliances?
As I understand it, the problem (in my region, your mileage may vary) is that the base rate is NOT fair. It is artificially kept low, with kWh rates artificially inflated to cover that subsidy. In theory, on average the utility makes a decent rate of return while executing a sort of social justice that charges above market rates to big energy users and charges below market rates to the poor and elderly who use little electricity. Since the fixed cost of maintaining a system is so high, this was considered equitable. Anyone who moves from high-energy to low-energy is no longer contributing the "extra" that subsidizes the poor and elderly (or else goes into shareholders' pockets), and that is why the energy companies are upset. If we didn't have this wonky pricing structure, and everyone paid a higher connection charge (and lower per-kWh rate), it wouldn't be an issue.
It's not a "bus line". It's a point to point service that causes parts of SF to become artificially more desirable to Google employees than they would be otherwise, whose wealth is propped up by Wall Street investment patterns.
This causes those particular neighborhoods to have housing costs move out-of-reach of median incomes.
I disagree with your use of the word "artificially" as every human construction can be called artifice. There exists sufficient mass transit in SF that SF Googlers can take MUNI to the Google bus stop from wherever they live in the city. The bus didn't cause all the Googlers to move to SF and take over the neighborhood; the Googlers were already living there and driving / carpooling / vanpooling to Mountain View in some number of vehicles that exceeded the number of buses now on the road. Every driver should be cheering. Yes, the bus means that some Googlers will decide to move to SF. No, you can't always have everything you want, not as long as others have the freedom to do what they want. Change happens. It's time for cooler heads to prevail, and for the neighbors to get to know the Googlers, invite them to integrate as a part of the awesome San Francisco community, tutor some inner-city kids, encourage them to use their 20% toward solving some local challenges, and embrace the future. Because San Francisco used to be so good at that.
Slashdot Mirror
The actually experience is different. Amazon reports that as they have grown bigger with more diverse offerings, the top drivers of revenue are shrinking. This is true if one is looking at a category (i.e. books) or as a whole. It looks like everybody has to buy the Harry Potter books, everybody will be buying a ticket to the next Star Wars film, etc.
From my observation, part of the reason for fewer items driving a greater percentage of the revenue is this: given three options for shampoo, I can try each of them and then reliably purchase my favorite. In a large population, we probably differ on what our favorite is. Given a hundred shampoos, once I find one that works decently, I'll stick with it; it's not worth it to me to try 90+ other shampoos. Replace shampoo with movie genre or book author, add in reviewer ratings so that we buy products that are reviewed more than untested and unreviewed products, and that's your Amazon experience.
Land line providers charge extra for long distance.
This is one of the biggest differences between the US and most other places in the world. I'm 36, from the UK, and remember long distance charges on landlines, but only just. Now just about all national calls from a landline are essentially free.
That's partly because the UK is less than the size of one US state, Oregon, whose population is under 4 million persons. You pack more than twice that many persons in London alone. When we say long distance, we mean long distance.
To your credit, when you say "a long time ago," you mean a long time ago.
Just for clarification, this is a flying car: http://imgur.com/oMwa9Yp
Notice the car on the right. That's from a 1940 magazine writting about what 2011 would look like.
From a fashion perspective, they were wrong about the tutus but right about the yoga pants.
And it's cool for Intel if it gets others thinking, "What could I do with a Galileo or Edison?" Maybe someone puts sensors under his bottles of liquor, to know if anyone has taken them off the shelf temporarily... or a new home security system, helping you confirm that all windows are shut at night... possibilities are endless if you start to think about it.
And this box lets you know who it was that didn't put it back, without spending a bunch of time to visually inventory every time it's taken out. (And don't assume visual inventories are perfect either...) My bet is that a production toolbox has more than 6 tools, and I sure as heck don't count all the sockets in my socket set when I pull it out. It's reliable because I'm the only one who uses it. But if I shared it with three other folks working other shifts, how do I expect them to remember, "Which of you used the 10mm socket?"
There's probably some lost time too, besides the cost of the tools. If they have to walk across their football-sized factory to get another whosit, it's a productivity cost, and that can add up. If they eliminate time spent at the start and end of day checking tool boxes for accurate contents, more time savings = more money savings.
I didn't know that the study had specifically taken kids from broken homes and compared them against kids from intact homes. If you can point me to that info, I'll happily concede that the study has too few controls to be clearly identifying results about identical versus fraternal twins. I would expect that well-cared-for kids from wealthy families would be more likely to have the opportunity to develop great drawing skills than those from poor homes where art supplies are a scarce luxury. But absent some clear methodological gap and failure to control for some variation between siblings (Rich Girl A got art lessons while her identical sister B got soccer lessons, or Poor Boy C received a scholarship to an inner-city after-school art program while his twin sister D had to wash dishes at a restaurant), I don't understand what besides genetics would drive a difference in demonstrated artistic ability between siblings.
The end of the article however jumps over to the recent flawed study that goes back to eugenics (one of many out of the UK in the last 2 years). That study claims that identical twins can draw pictures more similarly than fraternal twins, therefor genes are the key factor in a persons natural ability to draw. This study is flawed as they obviously ignore every other possible impact on a person's ability to draw a picture, and simply claim "genetics".
Please explain what are the other impacts on a person's ability to draw a picture. The primary difference between identical twins and fraternal twins is genetics. Each family may choose how much to treat its children identically versus differently, but that is a very complex item likely orthogonal to genetics.
Transient Occupancy Taxes are generally higher, for exactly that reason. And note that TOTs are not normally set at the state level but instead at the city level.
So if someone steals your phone and buys something with it, they can receive and delete the text confirming their purchase?
Fear and cost held me back for a long while too. Then I had kids and found myself crouching low, turning upside down, glasses moving as I looked under things to find lost pacifiers, being unable to see the one-year-old crawling on my tummy while I lay on my back, or was caught off guard by little fingers approaching me from the side of my glasses -- it became a safety hazard and I signed up quickly. Rarely regretted it. Maybe once a month, I wake with the physical feeling that there's something in my eye. It tears up for 10-15 minutes. But I can see better, without fingerprint smudges and eyebrow grease and dust on my glasses; the nosepads are never out of alignment nor do the earpieces cause aches. I look and feel different. It is weird in a sense to see so many years of photos of me with glasses, but I like being glasses-free.
I got LASIK. Now I can buy a $10 pair of sunglasses rather than get prescription sunglasses, wear eye protection in the woodshop, and walk indoors on a cold day without losing my vision temporarily to fogging lenses.
Current LASIK is NASA-approved. And they make it sound like a selling point, as if by having laser eye surgery, I qualified to be an astronaut.
It's been standard knowledge for home gardeners that growing just one thing (e.g. tomatoes or carrots) in a certain space makes it easy for the bugs that feed on it to find it, but if you mix things up then the pests are confused and less successful. To protect against plant-specific pests, put a variety of things together in your garden: flowers, herbs, vegetables. The good pollinators like honeybees will love it; the carrot fly and tomato hornworm moth will have a much harder time finding the carrots and tomatoes to land on and lay their eggs.
Match.com's press release includes a hilarious "heat map listing where the smartest singles live," by mapping where Ivy League grads live. Apparently graduates of Stanford, U Chicago, CalTech, UC Berkeley, Northwestern, etc. aren't as smart. More likely, they're just not as rich and historically connected to Daddy's alma mater. http://blog.match.com/wp-conte...
And those cloudbotnets are probably the ones that send me 100 spam per day, and write Buzzfeed headlines like "10 Most Gorgeous Actresses of the 1990s."
When I pointed this out to the other workers they laughted and said their jobs were safe for the rest of their lives.
Funny that is what I was told when I worked at GM on the truck line, now those jobs are gone. Not to another country, the robots replace the humans.
And if fast food workers succeed in asking for a living wage, I expect that their robot replacements will arrive faster.
Does this mean that if Marvell delays paying CMU for 50 years, they'll only pay an additional 7%? Compared to the rate of inflation, that's a marvelous deal.
Based on Amazon reviews which say they had this book since the 1980s, it is probably this book: "The Starving Students' Cookbook" by Dede Hall. Another option is "The Impoverished Student's Book of Cookery, Drinkery and Housekeepery," available at the Reed College Bookstore online.
it's uncommon to find cereals with less than 150 calories per 1 oz serving.
Not sure how your math works. At 4 calories per gram for carbs and protein, a 1 oz / 28 gram serving is ~110 calories. It's true for Count Chocula and for Special K both. You can't reach 150 calories unless the cereal contains 8 grams of fat, which is a pretty greasy cereal. More likely you're including the milk in your numbers.
I agree that basic cable TV can be a reasonable expense, compared to other entertainment options. Taking a family of four to one movie per month can cost $40, depending on the details. At the same time, the extended packages with the premium sports channels etc. can approach $150/month, at which point it is clearly a luxury.
But if you can feed a family of four on non-organic food for $4800/year, that's 662 hours at minimum wage, or 13 hours/week. I don't take taxes out of that hourly wage, because a family of four that earns minimum wage qualifies for EITC rather than paying federal income taxes.
I would like to know if anyone is aware of a good training/education program (or book) to help folks understand how to cook healthy inexpensive meals that are not too complex (time-consuming) and decently flavorful. I think that would help bridge the gap, and I'd gladly get involved with such a program as my schedule allows.
The author Michael Pollan has a simple set of 3 rules for managing your nutrition: 1. Eat food*; 2. Not too much; 3. Mostly plants.
* What he means by this is "real" food, rather than the "edible food-like substances" that constitute the bulk of the American diet. He has a simple rule for identifying real food: If you've ever seen it advertised on TV, it's probably not real food.
Since I don't watch TV, how do I know what is advertised on TV versus what is "real food"?
Lets see them budget the cost of not having to build peaking plants and extra full power plants as renewables slow the need for growth. Accounting works both ways :)
In the long run, you're correct. In the short run, sadly, my local electricity company applies for a rate increase to cover the depreciation on an already-existing peaking plant that is not being used at full capacity. And it's not limited to electricity. When we conserved water due to a drought, the water utility applied for rate increases, because we were not using enough water. But when we use lots of water, do they offer us a rebate? No, I think not!
I don't object to a fair "base rate" that actually covers the maintenance overhead; seems fair to pay that even if you're a net seller to the utility.
That much is perfectly fine, but why should a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by, say, 5 kWh per day by means of installing solar batteries be treated differently than a customer who decreases his electricity consumption by 5 kWh per day by means of buying more energy-saving home appliances?
As I understand it, the problem (in my region, your mileage may vary) is that the base rate is NOT fair. It is artificially kept low, with kWh rates artificially inflated to cover that subsidy. In theory, on average the utility makes a decent rate of return while executing a sort of social justice that charges above market rates to big energy users and charges below market rates to the poor and elderly who use little electricity. Since the fixed cost of maintaining a system is so high, this was considered equitable. Anyone who moves from high-energy to low-energy is no longer contributing the "extra" that subsidizes the poor and elderly (or else goes into shareholders' pockets), and that is why the energy companies are upset. If we didn't have this wonky pricing structure, and everyone paid a higher connection charge (and lower per-kWh rate), it wouldn't be an issue.
It's not a "bus line". It's a point to point service that causes parts of SF to become artificially more desirable to Google employees than they would be otherwise, whose wealth is propped up by Wall Street investment patterns.
This causes those particular neighborhoods to have housing costs move out-of-reach of median incomes.
I disagree with your use of the word "artificially" as every human construction can be called artifice. There exists sufficient mass transit in SF that SF Googlers can take MUNI to the Google bus stop from wherever they live in the city. The bus didn't cause all the Googlers to move to SF and take over the neighborhood; the Googlers were already living there and driving / carpooling / vanpooling to Mountain View in some number of vehicles that exceeded the number of buses now on the road. Every driver should be cheering. Yes, the bus means that some Googlers will decide to move to SF. No, you can't always have everything you want, not as long as others have the freedom to do what they want. Change happens. It's time for cooler heads to prevail, and for the neighbors to get to know the Googlers, invite them to integrate as a part of the awesome San Francisco community, tutor some inner-city kids, encourage them to use their 20% toward solving some local challenges, and embrace the future. Because San Francisco used to be so good at that.