Anyone building on previous work should be checking said work to be sure their own continuing work is valid. I know I did that when I did my paper. Interestingly enough, the work I built on had the right conclusions but the supporting work it was based on was incorrect, or at the very least based on badly processed data. It just so happened that the errors in the process happened to not manifest too strongly for their limited cases in their presentation. Or maybe they limited their cases to those that fit their empirical observations? Who knows, but the underlying work had major flaws.
I think you're confused or merely trolling. Sadly, your misinformation could have been corrected in less than 5s via any common search engine indicating just how truly poor your knowledge is.
Well, the funny thing is that Edge numbers are under 10% according to the last chart I saw. That puts it under MacOS as a target. What was that tripe about marketshare and being the target of hackers?
Since the computational complexity of the BC transactions grows with time
That's not how it works. The complexity grows with the mining capacity. And mining capacity grows (and possibly shrinks) with price of bitcoin, mining reward, and electricity. The mining reward consists of a fixed reward per block (halved every 4 years), plus a fee per transaction (determined by market mechanism)
You're right - it doesn't grow with time, it grows with transactions. It has nothing to do with the mining capacity, although transaction cost might increase as the capacity goes down, and the time to complete transactions will go up once capacity thresholds are reached. The whole thing is a virtual house of cards.
Usually what it takes is for the inertia crowd to start keeling over. And about all these endocrine disrupters and estrogen mimics, it will happen.
Well, that's one way to stop all this nonsense about converting algae into some "sustainable" food source. Only partly kidding there. Something has to stop the population growth, and personally I'd prefer a voluntary approach. Algae as meat, catastrophic epidemics and world population affecting disasters are not on my bucket list.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
That's both the most true and the most false thing I've read today. I'd say 99% of software people don't have a clue what's inside their shiny beige/silver/black boxes they use daily to get work done. If you open it up and show a kid the insides, they'll shortly know more than 99% of those software devs.
As for the "experts" in this article, when they try to blame autism on organophosphates that's a pretty big red flag. When they further say things like "We found no evidence of a safe level of organophosphate pesticide exposure for children" that pretty much confirms that they're not to be taken seriously. They then go on to tell you to "buy organic" and "wash your food", the latter of which is probably the only truly rational suggestion in the entire article.
Causes neurological issues - check
in womb exposure heightens damage - check
c6gunner denounces potential autism tie in - check
Look, I agree more information than just that referenced in TFA is needed to come to a conclusion. But seriously the EU and US have already banned more than 75% of this class of compounds, so they're not just whistling in the wind on their "bad effects". If it turns out that even residual exposure such as residues on fruit can have effects on developing fetuses, we may finally have an explanation for the rise of documented autism cases than just "we recognize and document them more now".
Because of corporate profits. IIRC DuPont was front and center on that one, along with several other large corporations in their efforts to allow TEL to be introduced. The history of that was pretty interesting as there definitely were some non-democratic efforts going on behind the scenes to get TEL into gas.
No, Tim Cook just wants everyone to be locked into an Apple controlled environment, and other big businesses being out there stops him from being the one in charge of what they see, don't see, what programs/apps they can use, etc.
What twisted world view do you come from? Data privacy is data privacy, and he's all for it. Apple has yet to indicate they're doing anything other than exactly what they say with regards to data privacy. Just because you don't like the "walled garden" or have the mistaken belief that a mac doesn't allow you to run anything you want doesn't apply in any way to their stance on privacy.
You sound like one of those people who will look at someone who lives in poverty, and say they're not poor because they have a cellphone and a television.
SS was brilliant, from day 1. If nothing had changed, there'd never be a run on the trust. Average age was only about 68 in 1935, and had been pretty steady around that number historically. It didn't start going up noticeably until the 50s. But yes, under LBJ the SS system started being used as a combined slush fund, as was every other fund except the highway fund, for some reason.
Now if only we got some reasonable taxation schemes in place to reduce the ever growing debt we're currently being saddled with. Perhaps a 90% tax for all income above 10X the poverty line would help things? I kid, maybe 50% above 10X and not hitting 90% until 30-40X above the poverty line. FYI - the income tax has been higher. I'm also for removing property deductions, as that only helps subsidize increased costs of property.
After SS breaks the budget, there will be no debate.
There will be huge debate, as to who is actually at fault for "kiting" those checks. And who refused to fund the increasing demand. Speaking of increasing demand, who presented a $26B/year unfunded medicare mandate when he signed it? Right - forgot to add that to W, but then, this is peanuts compared to his other flaws, at least for now, that one hasn't fully come to roost either yet. I mean it's only been a few trillion in outlays with no offsetting revenue over the years. At least SS is still solvent after 80 years, despite the best efforts of Republicans to torpedo it. Yep, those ever "small government" loving Republicans, that love to saddle up more debt on the country while giving money to the rich and corporations. Medicare Part D might be their crowning achievement to destroy the country, we'll just have to wait and see.
Sorry, had to. Taft doesn't even register as a bad president. On the low side of mediocre, sure.
Buchanan was weak and ineffective. That certainly makes him a bad choice for president. However, I'd argue that precisely because of his weakness, he's incapable of being worst, because he took no actions that took us down the wrong path, only failed to turn the ship from the pending civil war. Could he have done it? It's highly doubtful - you had 2 sides polarized to the point that each thought the other was infringing on its rights as a people. And those sides were not only defined by beliefs, but by geography. In those circumstances, I doubt anything could have been done to keep everything harmonious.
Had you sad Woodrow Wilson, I could certainly agree to a case for it. He did have a major part in setting up the world for WW2, among many other bad actions he took. But few have had the direct world-wide effects of bad actions than W. He failed to head warnings about pending terrorist attacks in 2001, based on what we know today. He chose to do nothing and read children's books while the attacks took place. Not only did this attack do material damage but led to the first major economic calamity of his administration. Then with a completely arbitrary invasion of Iraq, he set up the environment for a complete collapse of middle eastern governments. But that's not all! He also through direct action by him and his leadership in pushing to deregulate banks and markets created an economic freefall leading to a world wide depression (still called a " deep recession" by many) with the effects only recently put behind us, more than 8 years after the initial crash.
I'd say that based on scale and direct attribution, W is hands down the worst president we've had, as his mismanagement and idealism have negatively affected the US far beyond his presidency. We're still experiencing negative effects directly attributable to him, and it's been 20 years since he took office.
While putting the bad in focus, it all that pales in comparison to the damage Trump is causing in less than 2 years. It's too early to sum up how bad Trump is, it may even take years to truly measure how bad he was for the country, but it's already obvious he's worse than W in damaging the US's standing in the world despite W destroying a sovereign country and being directly responsible for 2 major world-wide economic downturns.
You are literally arguing that inflation has not occurred since the 1970s.
Also, there's more things in GDP than computers.
I'm am being realistic. Computers, TVs, radios, cars. All are cheaper than they were in the 70s. Now, you may get more junk to keep prices up, but they're still cheaper, after adjustment for inflation. So are telephone service, cell phones, eyeglasses, contacts, tires, wheels, and a whole host of other things. Gas, for instance, has pretty much fluctuated around the current 10 year average for 15+ years. Now some essential basics such as milk, bread, vegetables, etc, have gone up in prices, but as far as inflation goes, it's a tough call. Housing has gone up in price, but again, with the major drop due to 2008 it's hard to tell how much without considering a specific time period as well as general trends over a long time. Inflation is not some magic ever increasing line that dictates prices, especially when things vary as much as they do even day to day. For instance, my house sat at it's value for 12 years, then suddenly jumped 30% in 3. I know others that lost 50% of their value in the same time period.
TL;DR essentially there's a lot more wrapped up in inflation and cost of living than any simple statement can adequately describe.
To get back on track - when a Chinese company can make and ship you a product from China for less than an American company can ship the same product within a town, there's definitely a problem.
You're not on track. The US makes twice as much stuff as it did in the 1970s. Goods from China does not change that statistic, because it's only measuring domestically-produced stuff. Bringing in China is like saying you weigh 180 lbs when we're measuring height.
We also have more than 60% as many people as in 1970, so technically, you're saying we're just a little more productive as we were in the 70s.
And you have a funny way of looking at things. I'm stating that when you can build a wagon for $5 and have to pay $5 to ship it to your neighbor, and a guy in China can make and ship that wagon to your neighbor for $4 total, you've got a major problem. That's what we're looking at here, regarding jobs being shipped overseas. It's even worse when that $4 wagon actually costs you an extra $5 via taxes, but it's a "hidden cost". That's the current situation with regards to China directly shipping things to US customers. Now, if we were to shift that $5 shipping cost to the Chinese shipper, and he's now charging $9 for his wagon, and yours is $10 but will get here a month earlier, well, that changes things a lot. It changes even more if the recapturing of previously subsidized costs actually lower your shipping to $4 and you're now equal footing.
First, the reason we aren't getting paid relative to our productivity is because of crap like the postal system above that allows cheap 3rd world child labor to produce and ship things overseas for less than just shipping the item locally costs
You think shipping costing $1 instead of $3 is sufficient to have stopped all productivity-based wage increases since 1978?
We make double the stuff per hour that we did in the 1970s. We use 1/3rd the workers of the 1970s to do it. If productivity and wages scaled like they did up until
about 1978, then inflation-adjusted US wages should have gone up about 6x (1/3rd the workers, making 2x the stuff). Instead, inflation-adjusted wages are flat or negative.
It isn't shipping that's the problem.
Stuff's also cheaper than it was in the 70s. You can now buy a computer for wrist for a few hundred dollars that is more powerful than $40,000 desktop (in today's dollars) So what the real comparison on wages and products should be is purchasing power for value received. Not everything scaled the same way, but that's a discussion that would go on for pages....
To get back on track - when a Chinese company can make and ship you a product from China for less than an American company can ship the same product within a town, there's definitely a problem.
Those tariffs were applied precisely to have the greatest effect on Trump supporters, since Trump instituted the tariffs
They also happen to be the main goods we export to China.
But there's good news! We used to utterly dominate things like the soy market. Nobody could compete against us on price, so nobody tried to build a significant soy industry. Thanks to Trump reverting to trade theory that was disproven in the 1600s, Brazil is competing with us now. And they're able to sell soy at the post-tariff US price. And that's going to drop as they continue to build their industry. In other agricultural products, Brazil can sell at the US price, so soy will get there too.
So this isn't something that's going to be "fixed" if there is some sort of trade deal with China. We've given away a monopoly that we will never get back. US soy farmers are going to make less money forever thanks to Trump's tariffs.
My point was those Chinese tariffs hurting US farmers and autos were put in place specifically as a retaliatory measure where it would hurt the administration the most. I agree with the rest of the tariff analysis. Trump has done irreparable harm to US interests across many areas. But he's not doing it alone.
I never thought I'd wistfully think of the "good" ole days of W who was pretty well hands-down the worst president in history. Sigh... the gold old days.
I think this issue may be a bit more complicated than you might think. On the face, it certainly doesn't make any sense whatsoever for goods from China and other third world countries to ship so cheaply into the US. But, American consumers have benefited significantly from this, though it came at the expense of American factory workers whose jobs are long long gone.
I'd say that American consumers have so far successfully kicked the can down the road until the day of reckoning has come. It couldn't stay this way forever. The longer we wait, the more painful the correction.
If Americans were actually getting paid relative to their productivity then they'd have the wherewithal to afford locally sourced products, even at double or triple the price of imports. Effectively cutting off the US from the global market right now however will have devastating consequences for American consumers in the short term, the same way that the tariffs that have already been implemented have had devastating consequences on mid-western farmers and the auto industry.
First, the reason we aren't getting paid relative to our productivity is because of crap like the postal system above that allows cheap 3rd world child labor to produce and ship things overseas for less than just shipping the item locally costs. I'd say that's ridiculous and needs to be fixed. Will it "hurt" consumers based on the current unfair status quo? Absolutely. Is it the only correct course of action? Absolutely.
Those tariffs were applied precisely to have the greatest effect on Trump supporters, since Trump instituted the tariffs. I agree with the tariffs in general, just not in the way the administration has implemented them. I've long thought all imports should be inspected at all border/ports of entry and those inspections paid for by the transiting company, thus enhancing our country's general security. No, this isn't border security to keep out all illegals. It's border security to ensure that no contraband nor things like dangerous foreign pests enter the country. In some cases, this might even require full unpacking and repackaging of contents of containers to remove things like cheap pallets that might house invasive beetles. Will it increase prices? Again, yes, but it will do so for multiple good reasons. That a side effect is reducing the benefits of cheap 3rd world labor and stopping the import of sub-standard or other dangerous products is just another benefit.
We need to fix the income inequality in our country first, and I don't see threatening postal rates on imports and setting up tariffs as having any meaningful impact on that problem. Granted, in order to fix the income inequality in our country we need to stop our corporations from buying off most of our politicians and reverse their decimation of organized labor.
Income inequality is a totally different and wholly internal problem that is orthogonal to the shipping out of US jobs and pollution. Yes, we're doing that too, might as well admit to the full range of reasons things are being made overseas in countries with less than exemplar environmental policies in place. But don't confuse 1 with the other, the internal issues are a political issue and could be overcome with election campaign reform, but that's unlikely to happen as any meaningful reform requires those in power to willingly remove themselves from future power.
No, you need a public key do encrypt. The private key is for decrypting. So, yes, they can encrypt anything you receive by having your public key, and they only you can read the encrypted version.
I see my data is outdated (I've not delved into the specifics in a really long time, obviously) Originally, the entire PGP process was RSA encryption, which IIRC required a private key. Now I see that PGP 2 and later shifted to a different non-compatible encryption scheme. Interesting. Always like learning new stuff.
I think you're confused.:) Even if they encrypt the mail - they can decrypt it. You need a private key to encrypt and anything you encrypt, you can decrypt. So they are misleading you if they say they're encrypting unencrypted mail (the case when someone, say a gmail person, sends email to a protonmail account) there is absolutely no way that the protonmail people can encrypt that email, allow you to decrypt it, and not be able to decrypt it themselves. PGP doesn't work that way. So, while it's true that it's not readily readable by anyone that hacks the server, it's also not true that no one can easily read that email. That said, there is a case I can think of where they conceivably could not decrypt - they could create a 1 time use public private pair, encrypt with the user's public, and then toss the just generated pair. But what they likely do is periodically create a utility key pair for this purpose and toss them when they are replaced. Creating a key-pair is a non-trivial computation so likely using a couple of keys and swapping them out after 'x' uses or 'y' time would be best. It'd be interesting to know what they do as they could conceivably decrypt select email(s) for the hopefully short key retention time and how many accounts such a key would be used for. There are no other possibilities.
People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I don't think that's the case. On their Security page they say this:
"(...) your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to. This means we don't have the technical ability to decrypt your messages, and as a result, we are unable to hand your data over to third parties. (...) For this reason, we are also unable to do data recovery. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data."
Exactly - read what's there and what I said. There's no difference.:) Truly secure PGP (GPG) encrypted mail requires a unique Public/Private key pair on each unique email user's client(s) meaning that there could be multiple email clients in use by a single user on a single account. User A has a pair, and User B has a pair, for those 2 to communicate, they must first share their public keys. Which admittedly ProtonMail could be the repository of, or A & B could keep one or both locked away only to be shared as they wish. In any case, ProtonMail doesn't have the private key(s) so can't decrypt the email.
Now, I happen to know for a fact that you can send email from a non ProtonMail client to a ProtonMail address. That means that there's no key pair on the sender's client, and no way for that mail to be encrypted. There is no way around that simple fact, and those emails will be sent in plain text and remain in plain text everywhere it goes, even if it goes through an encrypted pipe like SSL or a VPN.
I'd go with the buy a service option. Namecheap, godaddy, and a bunch of others all offer relatively inexpensive mail services per year. Buy your domain and mail from a single vendor if you want a low-effort mail system almost as painless as GMail.
ProtonMail is a different beast. It works best between people that both use ProtonMail or equivalent clients. This basically goes back to PGP (now GPG) encrypted email, where clients encrypt their mail locally and the server only stores encrypted mail without the keys. People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I haven't run ProtonMail personally, opting for my own services, but I did check them out a few years ago.
True, but I don't think there's ever been so much dreck at the top of the charts. I mean, 11 entries for Sheeran in the top 40? At once? From a single album? While Sheeran isn't completely talentless compared to, say, oh, pretty much the rest of the top 40.... but he's no Elvis, Johnny Cash, Elton John, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Garth Brooks or even Cher, for goodness sake. And none of them had half that many in the top 40 at once from what I can recall. (Ok, Sheeran might be equivalent to Cher)
Yeah, if your genre is dying, there's not much to be done about that. I don't know anything about old-school country. If you are looking for 90s-era rap there is Killer Mike off the top of my head. I haven't really been on the lookout for even older Sugarhill Gang type stuff so I have to plead ignorance there. "Alternative" is probably my main focus, whatever that means. Most recent likes include Milky Chance, War On Drugs, The Lumineers, Regina Spektor, Delta Spirit, and St. Vincent.
Old school country isn't my favorite, but I could at least listen to it. The countryfied pop/lt rock coming out of Memphis these days just makes me cringe. Next they'll be remaking Poison songs, if they haven't already.
Milky Chance, The Lumineers and St. Vincent are fall into the light pop category for me. It's not that they're terrible or hated, it's that they're missing something, there's just no soul in their music, no real pop, nothing to latch onto. They might as well be remakes of Sheeran/Cher/Celine. The others are not my thing.
I do like Twentyone Pilots, Pop Evil, Imagine Dragons, Jack White and Arctic Monkeys (although the last couple are a touch older, but then so are the Lumineers) among some other more recent acts. Each one has a relatively unique sound and you can tell the band normally from just a few seconds of play time. Most of the crap on the top 40 list you can't even tell apart anymore. One of the best demonstrations of terribly talentless top 40 music I've ever heard was on youtube but has now sadly been removed. It involved a number of Nickleback top 40 songs being switched independently on left/right channels without causing you to go into any deeper audible hurt state than you would just because you were listening to Nickleback in the first place. If you weren't aware they were separate songs, you might not even notice the left/right switching even occurring.
Newspapers also didn't believe that if they went walled garden it wouldn't backfire in a spectacular fashion either, but it did. The thing is, google might try to do it if it looks like there are massive drop-offs in continuous users, but enough of a user base to remain profitable. In the worst case scenario? They try to leverage their ad service so it only works with one or two browsers, in turn sites starved for money try to force users to use a particular browser. The usual useragent tricks no longer work as the browser requires authing off a unique hash.
There's plenty of ways they could do it, of course they'd also set themselves up for some ripe trustbusting.
First on Google - while I admit there are technical methods to make it happen, they can't because any of those proposals would cut their audience in major ways. And they don't have the pull for the most desirable US target audience - iPhone users. So if you can't get iPhone users, you've already failed. Google needs their iPhone target audience more than Apple needs Google.
Newspapers screwed up a long long long time ago. They made some serious miscalculations, in ways that were painful to watch even as they made them. The things they should have done, but didn't:
Made your monthly subscription include the web automatically
Made a web only version subscription a little less than a paper subscription
Offer only "front-page" like headings etc on the "free" front page side
Instead, they charged a full plus subscription fee for their content, meaning almost no one went to their websites. Then they offered it up for free. Then they tried to go to a subscription model again. It's almost as many mistakes as Sears made. I mean, explain to me how America's mail-order catalogue super store didn't automatically become America's web store? Instead we got Amazon. Whomever was running Sears in the 90s should be saddled with the full failure of Sears. That was some spectacular lack of vision there.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone building on previous work should be checking said work to be sure their own continuing work is valid. I know I did that when I did my paper. Interestingly enough, the work I built on had the right conclusions but the supporting work it was based on was incorrect, or at the very least based on badly processed data. It just so happened that the errors in the process happened to not manifest too strongly for their limited cases in their presentation. Or maybe they limited their cases to those that fit their empirical observations? Who knows, but the underlying work had major flaws.
I think you're confused or merely trolling. Sadly, your misinformation could have been corrected in less than 5s via any common search engine indicating just how truly poor your knowledge is.
Well, the funny thing is that Edge numbers are under 10% according to the last chart I saw. That puts it under MacOS as a target. What was that tripe about marketshare and being the target of hackers?
Also we don't have "blood bitcoins" yet: coins mined by kids under horrible conditions. Well, give it time...
Now you have me picturing hordes of children running on treadmills powering generators....
Since the computational complexity of the BC transactions grows with time
That's not how it works. The complexity grows with the mining capacity. And mining capacity grows (and possibly shrinks) with price of bitcoin, mining reward, and electricity. The mining reward consists of a fixed reward per block (halved every 4 years), plus a fee per transaction (determined by market mechanism)
You're right - it doesn't grow with time, it grows with transactions. It has nothing to do with the mining capacity, although transaction cost might increase as the capacity goes down, and the time to complete transactions will go up once capacity thresholds are reached. The whole thing is a virtual house of cards.
the mothership arrives, then we'll all be sorry for not listening to Dr Quack!
Usually what it takes is for the inertia crowd to start keeling over. And about all these endocrine disrupters and estrogen mimics, it will happen.
Well, that's one way to stop all this nonsense about converting algae into some "sustainable" food source. Only partly kidding there. Something has to stop the population growth, and personally I'd prefer a voluntary approach. Algae as meat, catastrophic epidemics and world population affecting disasters are not on my bucket list.
Bottom line: Open up a computer and show them the insides. They'll learn pretty quickly all the stuff software people like us know. Maybe even more.
That's both the most true and the most false thing I've read today. I'd say 99% of software people don't have a clue what's inside their shiny beige/silver/black boxes they use daily to get work done. If you open it up and show a kid the insides, they'll shortly know more than 99% of those software devs.
Heck, if the recent discoveries of the effects on glyphosate on insects bears out, that one may be worse than anything you listed.
As for the "experts" in this article, when they try to blame autism on organophosphates that's a pretty big red flag. When they further say things like "We found no evidence of a safe level of organophosphate pesticide exposure for children" that pretty much confirms that they're not to be taken seriously. They then go on to tell you to "buy organic" and "wash your food", the latter of which is probably the only truly rational suggestion in the entire article.
Look, I agree more information than just that referenced in TFA is needed to come to a conclusion. But seriously the EU and US have already banned more than 75% of this class of compounds, so they're not just whistling in the wind on their "bad effects". If it turns out that even residual exposure such as residues on fruit can have effects on developing fetuses, we may finally have an explanation for the rise of documented autism cases than just "we recognize and document them more now".
Because of corporate profits. IIRC DuPont was front and center on that one, along with several other large corporations in their efforts to allow TEL to be introduced. The history of that was pretty interesting as there definitely were some non-democratic efforts going on behind the scenes to get TEL into gas.
No, Tim Cook just wants everyone to be locked into an Apple controlled environment, and other big businesses being out there stops him from being the one in charge of what they see, don't see, what programs/apps they can use, etc.
What twisted world view do you come from? Data privacy is data privacy, and he's all for it. Apple has yet to indicate they're doing anything other than exactly what they say with regards to data privacy. Just because you don't like the "walled garden" or have the mistaken belief that a mac doesn't allow you to run anything you want doesn't apply in any way to their stance on privacy.
You sound like one of those people who will look at someone who lives in poverty, and say they're not poor because they have a cellphone and a television.
I'd say that person made poor choices.
SS was brilliant, from day 1. If nothing had changed, there'd never be a run on the trust. Average age was only about 68 in 1935, and had been pretty steady around that number historically. It didn't start going up noticeably until the 50s. But yes, under LBJ the SS system started being used as a combined slush fund, as was every other fund except the highway fund, for some reason.
Now if only we got some reasonable taxation schemes in place to reduce the ever growing debt we're currently being saddled with. Perhaps a 90% tax for all income above 10X the poverty line would help things? I kid, maybe 50% above 10X and not hitting 90% until 30-40X above the poverty line. FYI - the income tax has been higher. I'm also for removing property deductions, as that only helps subsidize increased costs of property.
FDR. His kited checks still haven't landed.
After SS breaks the budget, there will be no debate.
There will be huge debate, as to who is actually at fault for "kiting" those checks. And who refused to fund the increasing demand. Speaking of increasing demand, who presented a $26B/year unfunded medicare mandate when he signed it? Right - forgot to add that to W, but then, this is peanuts compared to his other flaws, at least for now, that one hasn't fully come to roost either yet. I mean it's only been a few trillion in outlays with no offsetting revenue over the years. At least SS is still solvent after 80 years, despite the best efforts of Republicans to torpedo it. Yep, those ever "small government" loving Republicans, that love to saddle up more debt on the country while giving money to the rich and corporations. Medicare Part D might be their crowning achievement to destroy the country, we'll just have to wait and see.
Taft? Are you daft?
Sorry, had to. Taft doesn't even register as a bad president. On the low side of mediocre, sure.
Buchanan was weak and ineffective. That certainly makes him a bad choice for president. However, I'd argue that precisely because of his weakness, he's incapable of being worst, because he took no actions that took us down the wrong path, only failed to turn the ship from the pending civil war. Could he have done it? It's highly doubtful - you had 2 sides polarized to the point that each thought the other was infringing on its rights as a people. And those sides were not only defined by beliefs, but by geography. In those circumstances, I doubt anything could have been done to keep everything harmonious.
Had you sad Woodrow Wilson, I could certainly agree to a case for it. He did have a major part in setting up the world for WW2, among many other bad actions he took. But few have had the direct world-wide effects of bad actions than W. He failed to head warnings about pending terrorist attacks in 2001, based on what we know today. He chose to do nothing and read children's books while the attacks took place. Not only did this attack do material damage but led to the first major economic calamity of his administration. Then with a completely arbitrary invasion of Iraq, he set up the environment for a complete collapse of middle eastern governments. But that's not all! He also through direct action by him and his leadership in pushing to deregulate banks and markets created an economic freefall leading to a world wide depression (still called a " deep recession" by many) with the effects only recently put behind us, more than 8 years after the initial crash.
I'd say that based on scale and direct attribution, W is hands down the worst president we've had, as his mismanagement and idealism have negatively affected the US far beyond his presidency. We're still experiencing negative effects directly attributable to him, and it's been 20 years since he took office.
While putting the bad in focus, it all that pales in comparison to the damage Trump is causing in less than 2 years. It's too early to sum up how bad Trump is, it may even take years to truly measure how bad he was for the country, but it's already obvious he's worse than W in damaging the US's standing in the world despite W destroying a sovereign country and being directly responsible for 2 major world-wide economic downturns.
Stuff's also cheaper than it was in the 70s.
You are literally arguing that inflation has not occurred since the 1970s.
Also, there's more things in GDP than computers.
I'm am being realistic. Computers, TVs, radios, cars. All are cheaper than they were in the 70s. Now, you may get more junk to keep prices up, but they're still cheaper, after adjustment for inflation. So are telephone service, cell phones, eyeglasses, contacts, tires, wheels, and a whole host of other things. Gas, for instance, has pretty much fluctuated around the current 10 year average for 15+ years. Now some essential basics such as milk, bread, vegetables, etc, have gone up in prices, but as far as inflation goes, it's a tough call. Housing has gone up in price, but again, with the major drop due to 2008 it's hard to tell how much without considering a specific time period as well as general trends over a long time. Inflation is not some magic ever increasing line that dictates prices, especially when things vary as much as they do even day to day. For instance, my house sat at it's value for 12 years, then suddenly jumped 30% in 3. I know others that lost 50% of their value in the same time period.
TL;DR essentially there's a lot more wrapped up in inflation and cost of living than any simple statement can adequately describe.
To get back on track - when a Chinese company can make and ship you a product from China for less than an American company can ship the same product within a town, there's definitely a problem.
You're not on track. The US makes twice as much stuff as it did in the 1970s. Goods from China does not change that statistic, because it's only measuring domestically-produced stuff. Bringing in China is like saying you weigh 180 lbs when we're measuring height.
We also have more than 60% as many people as in 1970, so technically, you're saying we're just a little more productive as we were in the 70s.
And you have a funny way of looking at things. I'm stating that when you can build a wagon for $5 and have to pay $5 to ship it to your neighbor, and a guy in China can make and ship that wagon to your neighbor for $4 total, you've got a major problem. That's what we're looking at here, regarding jobs being shipped overseas. It's even worse when that $4 wagon actually costs you an extra $5 via taxes, but it's a "hidden cost". That's the current situation with regards to China directly shipping things to US customers. Now, if we were to shift that $5 shipping cost to the Chinese shipper, and he's now charging $9 for his wagon, and yours is $10 but will get here a month earlier, well, that changes things a lot. It changes even more if the recapturing of previously subsidized costs actually lower your shipping to $4 and you're now equal footing.
First, the reason we aren't getting paid relative to our productivity is because of crap like the postal system above that allows cheap 3rd world child labor to produce and ship things overseas for less than just shipping the item locally costs
You think shipping costing $1 instead of $3 is sufficient to have stopped all productivity-based wage increases since 1978?
We make double the stuff per hour that we did in the 1970s. We use 1/3rd the workers of the 1970s to do it. If productivity and wages scaled like they did up until about 1978, then inflation-adjusted US wages should have gone up about 6x (1/3rd the workers, making 2x the stuff). Instead, inflation-adjusted wages are flat or negative.
It isn't shipping that's the problem.
Stuff's also cheaper than it was in the 70s. You can now buy a computer for wrist for a few hundred dollars that is more powerful than $40,000 desktop (in today's dollars) So what the real comparison on wages and products should be is purchasing power for value received. Not everything scaled the same way, but that's a discussion that would go on for pages....
To get back on track - when a Chinese company can make and ship you a product from China for less than an American company can ship the same product within a town, there's definitely a problem.
Those tariffs were applied precisely to have the greatest effect on Trump supporters, since Trump instituted the tariffs
They also happen to be the main goods we export to China.
But there's good news! We used to utterly dominate things like the soy market. Nobody could compete against us on price, so nobody tried to build a significant soy industry. Thanks to Trump reverting to trade theory that was disproven in the 1600s, Brazil is competing with us now. And they're able to sell soy at the post-tariff US price. And that's going to drop as they continue to build their industry. In other agricultural products, Brazil can sell at the US price, so soy will get there too.
So this isn't something that's going to be "fixed" if there is some sort of trade deal with China. We've given away a monopoly that we will never get back. US soy farmers are going to make less money forever thanks to Trump's tariffs.
My point was those Chinese tariffs hurting US farmers and autos were put in place specifically as a retaliatory measure where it would hurt the administration the most. I agree with the rest of the tariff analysis. Trump has done irreparable harm to US interests across many areas. But he's not doing it alone.
I never thought I'd wistfully think of the "good" ole days of W who was pretty well hands-down the worst president in history. Sigh... the gold old days.
I think this issue may be a bit more complicated than you might think. On the face, it certainly doesn't make any sense whatsoever for goods from China and other third world countries to ship so cheaply into the US. But, American consumers have benefited significantly from this, though it came at the expense of American factory workers whose jobs are long long gone.
I'd say that American consumers have so far successfully kicked the can down the road until the day of reckoning has come. It couldn't stay this way forever. The longer we wait, the more painful the correction.
If Americans were actually getting paid relative to their productivity then they'd have the wherewithal to afford locally sourced products, even at double or triple the price of imports. Effectively cutting off the US from the global market right now however will have devastating consequences for American consumers in the short term, the same way that the tariffs that have already been implemented have had devastating consequences on mid-western farmers and the auto industry.
First, the reason we aren't getting paid relative to our productivity is because of crap like the postal system above that allows cheap 3rd world child labor to produce and ship things overseas for less than just shipping the item locally costs. I'd say that's ridiculous and needs to be fixed. Will it "hurt" consumers based on the current unfair status quo? Absolutely. Is it the only correct course of action? Absolutely.
Those tariffs were applied precisely to have the greatest effect on Trump supporters, since Trump instituted the tariffs. I agree with the tariffs in general, just not in the way the administration has implemented them. I've long thought all imports should be inspected at all border/ports of entry and those inspections paid for by the transiting company, thus enhancing our country's general security. No, this isn't border security to keep out all illegals. It's border security to ensure that no contraband nor things like dangerous foreign pests enter the country. In some cases, this might even require full unpacking and repackaging of contents of containers to remove things like cheap pallets that might house invasive beetles. Will it increase prices? Again, yes, but it will do so for multiple good reasons. That a side effect is reducing the benefits of cheap 3rd world labor and stopping the import of sub-standard or other dangerous products is just another benefit.
We need to fix the income inequality in our country first, and I don't see threatening postal rates on imports and setting up tariffs as having any meaningful impact on that problem. Granted, in order to fix the income inequality in our country we need to stop our corporations from buying off most of our politicians and reverse their decimation of organized labor.
Income inequality is a totally different and wholly internal problem that is orthogonal to the shipping out of US jobs and pollution. Yes, we're doing that too, might as well admit to the full range of reasons things are being made overseas in countries with less than exemplar environmental policies in place. But don't confuse 1 with the other, the internal issues are a political issue and could be overcome with election campaign reform, but that's unlikely to happen as any meaningful reform requires those in power to willingly remove themselves from future power.
No, you need a public key do encrypt. The private key is for decrypting. So, yes, they can encrypt anything you receive by having your public key, and they only you can read the encrypted version.
I see my data is outdated (I've not delved into the specifics in a really long time, obviously) Originally, the entire PGP process was RSA encryption, which IIRC required a private key. Now I see that PGP 2 and later shifted to a different non-compatible encryption scheme. Interesting. Always like learning new stuff.
I think you're confused. :) Even if they encrypt the mail - they can decrypt it. You need a private key to encrypt and anything you encrypt, you can decrypt. So they are misleading you if they say they're encrypting unencrypted mail (the case when someone, say a gmail person, sends email to a protonmail account) there is absolutely no way that the protonmail people can encrypt that email, allow you to decrypt it, and not be able to decrypt it themselves. PGP doesn't work that way. So, while it's true that it's not readily readable by anyone that hacks the server, it's also not true that no one can easily read that email. That said, there is a case I can think of where they conceivably could not decrypt - they could create a 1 time use public private pair, encrypt with the user's public, and then toss the just generated pair. But what they likely do is periodically create a utility key pair for this purpose and toss them when they are replaced. Creating a key-pair is a non-trivial computation so likely using a couple of keys and swapping them out after 'x' uses or 'y' time would be best. It'd be interesting to know what they do as they could conceivably decrypt select email(s) for the hopefully short key retention time and how many accounts such a key would be used for. There are no other possibilities.
People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I don't think that's the case. On their Security page they say this:
"(...) your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to. This means we don't have the technical ability to decrypt your messages, and as a result, we are unable to hand your data over to third parties. (...) For this reason, we are also unable to do data recovery. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data."
Exactly - read what's there and what I said. There's no difference. :) Truly secure PGP (GPG) encrypted mail requires a unique Public/Private key pair on each unique email user's client(s) meaning that there could be multiple email clients in use by a single user on a single account. User A has a pair, and User B has a pair, for those 2 to communicate, they must first share their public keys. Which admittedly ProtonMail could be the repository of, or A & B could keep one or both locked away only to be shared as they wish. In any case, ProtonMail doesn't have the private key(s) so can't decrypt the email.
Now, I happen to know for a fact that you can send email from a non ProtonMail client to a ProtonMail address. That means that there's no key pair on the sender's client, and no way for that mail to be encrypted. There is no way around that simple fact, and those emails will be sent in plain text and remain in plain text everywhere it goes, even if it goes through an encrypted pipe like SSL or a VPN.
I'd go with the buy a service option. Namecheap, godaddy, and a bunch of others all offer relatively inexpensive mail services per year. Buy your domain and mail from a single vendor if you want a low-effort mail system almost as painless as GMail.
ProtonMail is a different beast. It works best between people that both use ProtonMail or equivalent clients. This basically goes back to PGP (now GPG) encrypted email, where clients encrypt their mail locally and the server only stores encrypted mail without the keys. People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I haven't run ProtonMail personally, opting for my own services, but I did check them out a few years ago.
There's never been a shortage of dreck
True, but I don't think there's ever been so much dreck at the top of the charts. I mean, 11 entries for Sheeran in the top 40? At once? From a single album? While Sheeran isn't completely talentless compared to, say, oh, pretty much the rest of the top 40.... but he's no Elvis, Johnny Cash, Elton John, David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Garth Brooks or even Cher, for goodness sake. And none of them had half that many in the top 40 at once from what I can recall. (Ok, Sheeran might be equivalent to Cher)
Yeah, if your genre is dying, there's not much to be done about that. I don't know anything about old-school country. If you are looking for 90s-era rap there is Killer Mike off the top of my head. I haven't really been on the lookout for even older Sugarhill Gang type stuff so I have to plead ignorance there. "Alternative" is probably my main focus, whatever that means. Most recent likes include Milky Chance, War On Drugs, The Lumineers, Regina Spektor, Delta Spirit, and St. Vincent.
Old school country isn't my favorite, but I could at least listen to it. The countryfied pop/lt rock coming out of Memphis these days just makes me cringe. Next they'll be remaking Poison songs, if they haven't already.
Milky Chance, The Lumineers and St. Vincent are fall into the light pop category for me. It's not that they're terrible or hated, it's that they're missing something, there's just no soul in their music, no real pop, nothing to latch onto. They might as well be remakes of Sheeran/Cher/Celine. The others are not my thing.
I do like Twentyone Pilots, Pop Evil, Imagine Dragons, Jack White and Arctic Monkeys (although the last couple are a touch older, but then so are the Lumineers) among some other more recent acts. Each one has a relatively unique sound and you can tell the band normally from just a few seconds of play time. Most of the crap on the top 40 list you can't even tell apart anymore. One of the best demonstrations of terribly talentless top 40 music I've ever heard was on youtube but has now sadly been removed. It involved a number of Nickleback top 40 songs being switched independently on left/right channels without causing you to go into any deeper audible hurt state than you would just because you were listening to Nickleback in the first place. If you weren't aware they were separate songs, you might not even notice the left/right switching even occurring.
Newspapers also didn't believe that if they went walled garden it wouldn't backfire in a spectacular fashion either, but it did. The thing is, google might try to do it if it looks like there are massive drop-offs in continuous users, but enough of a user base to remain profitable. In the worst case scenario? They try to leverage their ad service so it only works with one or two browsers, in turn sites starved for money try to force users to use a particular browser. The usual useragent tricks no longer work as the browser requires authing off a unique hash.
There's plenty of ways they could do it, of course they'd also set themselves up for some ripe trustbusting.
First on Google - while I admit there are technical methods to make it happen, they can't because any of those proposals would cut their audience in major ways. And they don't have the pull for the most desirable US target audience - iPhone users. So if you can't get iPhone users, you've already failed. Google needs their iPhone target audience more than Apple needs Google.
Newspapers screwed up a long long long time ago. They made some serious miscalculations, in ways that were painful to watch even as they made them. The things they should have done, but didn't:
Instead, they charged a full plus subscription fee for their content, meaning almost no one went to their websites. Then they offered it up for free. Then they tried to go to a subscription model again. It's almost as many mistakes as Sears made. I mean, explain to me how America's mail-order catalogue super store didn't automatically become America's web store? Instead we got Amazon. Whomever was running Sears in the 90s should be saddled with the full failure of Sears. That was some spectacular lack of vision there.