The author throws this premise and assumption in without giving it too much examination:
a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous...
That's a big leap. Countries with high populations densities, such as those in Europe and the Far East, will have a much easier/cheaper time of building out the infrastructure for reliable high-speed internet to a vast majority of their population. Here in the US, however, it's a lot more expensive. Simply hand-waving the "once such connections become ubiquitous" ignores the cost of installing that infrastructure, and the time required to extend it to enough households.
Besides, a 1080p movie is going to suck a lot of bandwidth, and I'm guessing most people won't want to pay for a connection fast enough when they can save a few bucks with a slower connection. Not to mention the whole throttling/bandwidth cap issue.
I suspect you're not familiar with the specifics of the bill--it limits how much an individual can invest in such a company--only up to 10% of their income or $10k (whichever is less) in the less-restrictive version of the bill. It ain't gonna make any investor go bankrupt who isn't headed there already.
Crowdsourcing is not specifically illegal, but there are many regulations and laws which apply to companies that allow investments. For a small business, these regulations can be enormously onerous--rules for how finances are tracked, requirements for independent auditors, etc. Mostly, this bill waives the requirements for such a small business for the first few years. I think there's an assumption that the company will either die out in that period or become large enough that it can afford those regulatory expenses.
Let's put some numbers to it as well. Annual car sales are about 6 million/year in the US. At a cost of $200/vehicle, that's a total incremental cost of $1.2B. That puts the "cost to save a life" at $1.2B/200 = $6 million per life saved, assuming that the backup cameras prevent every single death. I would posit that it's more likely to be half that effective at best, so $12M/live saved.
IMHO, such numbers put this proposal squarely in the same category as proposals to increase the required age/height/weight for children not to sit in booster seats--they result in a huge financial outlay by the public to offset a (statistically-speaking) relatively minor problem. The US sees about 2.4 million deaths per year. Two hundred is 8.3 thousandths of one percent of the death toll.
I would hardly call this a "novel" solution. It is as predictable as they come. "Got a safety problem? Add safety regulations or mandate safety devices!"
A truly novel solution (not that I'm suggesting this) would be something like "Kill someone while drunk driving? Spend the next 18 months cleaning puke off the toilets in bars."
There are a couple questions I have about the study:
1) How close was the correlation between the odd brain scans and incidence of autism? what was the error rate? 2) Can the brain scan be used to predict autism, rather than as a 20/20 hindsight study? 3) If the test does reliably predict autism, how practical is it to put it into use? I can't imagine it would make much sense to do it to every 6-month-old--the cost would be prohibitive, particularly since it's a relatively small percentage of the population which are autistic. Would this become something that is only used for children who have a high risk of developing autism?
It's also worth pointing out that the House of Representatives has passed a budget. It's the Democrat-controlled senate that hasn't taken up a budget for about three years now. Proposing a budget in today's political climate is just an invitation for your opponents to demagogue you in the media. Easier to threaten to shut down the government and then pass a Continuing Resolution rather than the constitutionally-demanded full budget.
Considering that Obama has only been president for slightly more than three years (and president-elect for only 4 months more), I find it hard to believe that Mitch McConnell has been stating that objective for 4-6 years. Besides, if you look beyond that statement to the reasoning behind it, you might find that there's some logical rationale behind it.
Personally, I'm wondering why we should be increasing research spending at all. Unfortunately, our political environment has become such that a spending freeze is often mischaracterized as "you're cutting off funding for X" when in fact such a proposal is status quo.
I found myself in exactly the same position about a year ago. Here's the thought process I went through:
1) If it's a marketable idea, one that could make bucketloads of money, the employer is going to pursue it. They'll even want you to spend work hours on it. Or they'll apply other company resources ($$$) to it.
2) If it's something you think is super cool, but isn't marketable, the employer isn't going to care about whether you do it on your own free time.
3) If it's an idea you think is awesome, your employer doesn't agree, and you turn out to be right (it becomes successful), this is the only place where there's a rub. One option (if it's some sort of internet site) is to run it through a proxy (person)--get a friend/neighbor to set up the service but give you all the necessary access to develop/administer it. Another is to fully develop the idea, but hold off on implementing until you're out of the employ of your current employer. A third option is to talk to legal and/or your boss and see if you can carve out an exemption from your contract for work not related to your employer's business.
For my current employer (who has a policy quite similar to yours), they were very open about the reason for such a policy. Simply put, they're hiring you for your mind, and if you've got a great idea, like it or not you'll be thinking about it during work hours. If you feel your current employer isn't compensating you sufficiently for all of the products of your mind, then you probably need to either A) talk to your employer about it, B) find a new job, or C) reassess how valuable your work really is. No offense is intended, but since you haven't mentioned how well you're paid, or even what industry you're working in, I have to leave it as a possibility.
You'd think that the lab-tested crashes would be the ones the NHTSA would be most concerned about occurring in the real world. Isn't the whole point of crash tests to determine that the car is safe in at least the most common types of crash? And if a vehicle fails (or catches on fire, or whatever) in that type of crash test, shouldn't that disqualify the car from being driven on US roads?
The consequences with a firearm are much more severe, and often involve death.
You're off a bit there--it should have read "The consequences with a firearm can be much more severe, and in rare cases involve death." The statistics for injuries and deaths from accidental discharge of firearms are alarmingly small. The number of crimes stopped, prevented, or deterred is astonishingly high. Sure, a gun has much greater potential to kill someone than a fire extinguisher. That's kind of the point. You use a fire extinguisher to take care of a fire. You use a gun to take care of the guy who just forcibly entered your apartment and intends on robbing/beating/raping you.
Unfortunately, no. There are other chemicals and minerals dissolved in the water which render the water unacceptable to dump into the ocean.
However, there is a positive side effect of pumping it down a well--it can help maintain the pressure in the reservoir, which keeps production levels from falling too quickly.
I think you failed to mention how much current is being pushed down that pair of 16AWG wires. The power loss comes from (current * resistance (of the conductors)), not from the voltage.
I do/have done both (run electrical and understand the implications), and GP has a point. When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC. Everything else in the house either converts it to DC or could run quite happily on DC. For certain you'd want to have a different kind of plug for DC devices, but even that would give us an opportunity to 1) standardize on one global plug standard, at least for DC, and 2) allow us to design a small, rugged, safe type of plug.
Or is there some implication that I'm missing, and that you decided not to point out, in favor of flaming GP?
There's a difference between "potential" and "actual". IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong), there has yet to be a case where fracking has actually been shown to have impacted groundwater, despite the claims of the local population. This is likely because the oil/gas companies do lots of environmental studies before they even start drilling--they don't just start punching holes in the ground willy-nilly.
Folks, this is exactly what you get when your elected representatives delegate regulation to appointed bureaucrats. I've said it before, and it bears repeating: if a regulation is important enough to enact, it's important enough to have the legislature go on record passing it, rather than letting political appointees create rules which have the force of law. Unelected = (largely) unaccountable.
What they've confirmed is that there was indeed a warming trend from about 1970 (or so) through about 2000. Before that, nothing significant. Since then, nothing significant. So we have a 30-year period of warming. That's an extremely short period when you're talking climate science. It also inconveniently doesn't match up with carbon dioxide emissions growth.
So the questions remain, as you say: "is it caused by man?" and (if I may paraphrase) "what, if anything, should we do about it?" Those two questions are quite significant, and completely separate from the furor about the earth warming/not warming.
For what it's worth, things still aren't on the up-and-up regarding the data, even in this case.
As a parent of a high-functioning autistic kid, I also enjoy the extra services which are required by federal law. However, I don't agree with the idea that such services are required on a national level. Let the school districts and states compete for the students and their tax dollars. If those services were to go away in my area, I would then need to choose whether to spend the extra time/money/effort to procure those services on my own, or go somewhere else. Why should I feel entitled to it?
I worked hard in high school, got good grades, and got some scholarships. That paid for a good portion of my schooling. I also worked a part-time job during the school year and got a much-higher-than-minimum-wage internship each summer, working full time. And I chose a cheaper-than average university. And I graduated with no debt.
You're making an assumption that the Federal Government is the only entity out there which funds schools, parks, urban development, and infrastructure. In the process, you're forgetting the several layers of government which could arguably do a more effective, efficient, and accountable job of administering those same functions: states, counties and municipalities. I, for one, would welcome the elimination of the Department of Education on the Federal level--I don't see it causing any actual improvement in our education system for the billions we spend on it, and it only insulates decisions from the voters it affects.
The same goes for HUD. Why must this kind of issue be managed on the federal level? Wouldn't the state and local governments be better informed and more invested in having an effective outcome?
Sure, houses are more expensive now than they were 40 years ago. They're also bigger (2700 sq ft today vs 1400 sq ft in 1970) and better-made, with more features. The cost of building the same house today that was the average 40 years ago hasn't changed nearly that amount. In addition, minimum wage makes for an absolutely useless measure of average household income. The ratio of median home price to median income (a much more useful statistic) has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, and if you ignore the housing bubble, the ratio increased from 3:1 to about 4:1. That hardly constitutes a tripling of housing price/income ratio; in fact, it means that price per square foot has dropped.
I worked through college. My parents paid for my transportation to and from school and for phone calls home, but other than that, I was on my own. I'm now 30, and have a very good paying job (I'm in the top 20% income-wise). It's possible, but you gotta 1) choose the right school, 2) choose a useful major, and 3) work your tail off, all which requirements are increasingly ignored. It's also worth pointing out that the perception of a college education has created (in my opinion) a bit of a bubble. Just like the housing bubble, people are investing ridiculous sums of money into something which doesn't have near that amount of value. You can point the blame in any number of directions--at parents for pushing kids into college when the kid isn't made out for it, at the kids for choosing majors which provide no marketable skills, at colleges for helping perpetuate the perception that a college education is necessary to lead a comfortable life (and who can blame them, from a marketing perspective?), or at the government for artificially inflating demand by guaranteeing loans a ridiculously low interest rates.
There are still LOTS of good-paying, non-college-degree-requiring jobs out there. The trades particularly are (and have been for some time) suffering from a shortage. Plumbers, electricians, welders, and the like. A good welder with his own equipment can make a very nice living.
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That's a big leap. Countries with high populations densities, such as those in Europe and the Far East, will have a much easier/cheaper time of building out the infrastructure for reliable high-speed internet to a vast majority of their population. Here in the US, however, it's a lot more expensive. Simply hand-waving the "once such connections become ubiquitous" ignores the cost of installing that infrastructure, and the time required to extend it to enough households.
Besides, a 1080p movie is going to suck a lot of bandwidth, and I'm guessing most people won't want to pay for a connection fast enough when they can save a few bucks with a slower connection. Not to mention the whole throttling/bandwidth cap issue.
I suspect you're not familiar with the specifics of the bill--it limits how much an individual can invest in such a company--only up to 10% of their income or $10k (whichever is less) in the less-restrictive version of the bill. It ain't gonna make any investor go bankrupt who isn't headed there already.
Crowdsourcing is not specifically illegal, but there are many regulations and laws which apply to companies that allow investments. For a small business, these regulations can be enormously onerous--rules for how finances are tracked, requirements for independent auditors, etc. Mostly, this bill waives the requirements for such a small business for the first few years. I think there's an assumption that the company will either die out in that period or become large enough that it can afford those regulatory expenses.
Those "subsidies" are nothing of the sort, actually--they're actually tax breaks, and they apply to pretty much every industry, not just to Big Oil.
Let's put some numbers to it as well. Annual car sales are about 6 million/year in the US. At a cost of $200/vehicle, that's a total incremental cost of $1.2B. That puts the "cost to save a life" at $1.2B/200 = $6 million per life saved, assuming that the backup cameras prevent every single death. I would posit that it's more likely to be half that effective at best, so $12M/live saved.
IMHO, such numbers put this proposal squarely in the same category as proposals to increase the required age/height/weight for children not to sit in booster seats--they result in a huge financial outlay by the public to offset a (statistically-speaking) relatively minor problem. The US sees about 2.4 million deaths per year. Two hundred is 8.3 thousandths of one percent of the death toll.
I would hardly call this a "novel" solution. It is as predictable as they come. "Got a safety problem? Add safety regulations or mandate safety devices!"
A truly novel solution (not that I'm suggesting this) would be something like "Kill someone while drunk driving? Spend the next 18 months cleaning puke off the toilets in bars."
There are a couple questions I have about the study:
1) How close was the correlation between the odd brain scans and incidence of autism? what was the error rate?
2) Can the brain scan be used to predict autism, rather than as a 20/20 hindsight study?
3) If the test does reliably predict autism, how practical is it to put it into use? I can't imagine it would make much sense to do it to every 6-month-old--the cost would be prohibitive, particularly since it's a relatively small percentage of the population which are autistic. Would this become something that is only used for children who have a high risk of developing autism?
/parent of an autistic son
It's also worth pointing out that the House of Representatives has passed a budget. It's the Democrat-controlled senate that hasn't taken up a budget for about three years now. Proposing a budget in today's political climate is just an invitation for your opponents to demagogue you in the media. Easier to threaten to shut down the government and then pass a Continuing Resolution rather than the constitutionally-demanded full budget.
Considering that Obama has only been president for slightly more than three years (and president-elect for only 4 months more), I find it hard to believe that Mitch McConnell has been stating that objective for 4-6 years. Besides, if you look beyond that statement to the reasoning behind it, you might find that there's some logical rationale behind it.
Personally, I'm wondering why we should be increasing research spending at all. Unfortunately, our political environment has become such that a spending freeze is often mischaracterized as "you're cutting off funding for X" when in fact such a proposal is status quo.
I found myself in exactly the same position about a year ago. Here's the thought process I went through:
1) If it's a marketable idea, one that could make bucketloads of money, the employer is going to pursue it. They'll even want you to spend work hours on it. Or they'll apply other company resources ($$$) to it.
2) If it's something you think is super cool, but isn't marketable, the employer isn't going to care about whether you do it on your own free time.
3) If it's an idea you think is awesome, your employer doesn't agree, and you turn out to be right (it becomes successful), this is the only place where there's a rub. One option (if it's some sort of internet site) is to run it through a proxy (person)--get a friend/neighbor to set up the service but give you all the necessary access to develop/administer it. Another is to fully develop the idea, but hold off on implementing until you're out of the employ of your current employer. A third option is to talk to legal and/or your boss and see if you can carve out an exemption from your contract for work not related to your employer's business.
For my current employer (who has a policy quite similar to yours), they were very open about the reason for such a policy. Simply put, they're hiring you for your mind, and if you've got a great idea, like it or not you'll be thinking about it during work hours. If you feel your current employer isn't compensating you sufficiently for all of the products of your mind, then you probably need to either A) talk to your employer about it, B) find a new job, or C) reassess how valuable your work really is. No offense is intended, but since you haven't mentioned how well you're paid, or even what industry you're working in, I have to leave it as a possibility.
You'd think that the lab-tested crashes would be the ones the NHTSA would be most concerned about occurring in the real world. Isn't the whole point of crash tests to determine that the car is safe in at least the most common types of crash? And if a vehicle fails (or catches on fire, or whatever) in that type of crash test, shouldn't that disqualify the car from being driven on US roads?
You're off a bit there--it should have read "The consequences with a firearm can be much more severe, and in rare cases involve death." The statistics for injuries and deaths from accidental discharge of firearms are alarmingly small. The number of crimes stopped, prevented, or deterred is astonishingly high. Sure, a gun has much greater potential to kill someone than a fire extinguisher. That's kind of the point. You use a fire extinguisher to take care of a fire. You use a gun to take care of the guy who just forcibly entered your apartment and intends on robbing/beating/raping you.
If you follow the link in the earlier story, 69 of the 92 GPS receivers had issues. That's either a lot of interference or a lot of older GPS units.
And even if it's old equipment, in my opinion it's still fair game, provided they're not all some obscure model that sold only a couple hundred units.
Sure, plenty of bad stuff was dumped in the oceans in the past. That doesn't mean that companies are allowed to continue doing so.
Unfortunately, no. There are other chemicals and minerals dissolved in the water which render the water unacceptable to dump into the ocean.
However, there is a positive side effect of pumping it down a well--it can help maintain the pressure in the reservoir, which keeps production levels from falling too quickly.
I think you failed to mention how much current is being pushed down that pair of 16AWG wires. The power loss comes from (current * resistance (of the conductors)), not from the voltage.
I do/have done both (run electrical and understand the implications), and GP has a point. When I think of the things in our house that *must* run on AC, it's only our fridge, freezer, and HVAC. Everything else in the house either converts it to DC or could run quite happily on DC. For certain you'd want to have a different kind of plug for DC devices, but even that would give us an opportunity to 1) standardize on one global plug standard, at least for DC, and 2) allow us to design a small, rugged, safe type of plug.
Or is there some implication that I'm missing, and that you decided not to point out, in favor of flaming GP?
There's a difference between "potential" and "actual". IIRC (and please correct me if I'm wrong), there has yet to be a case where fracking has actually been shown to have impacted groundwater, despite the claims of the local population. This is likely because the oil/gas companies do lots of environmental studies before they even start drilling--they don't just start punching holes in the ground willy-nilly.
Folks, this is exactly what you get when your elected representatives delegate regulation to appointed bureaucrats. I've said it before, and it bears repeating: if a regulation is important enough to enact, it's important enough to have the legislature go on record passing it, rather than letting political appointees create rules which have the force of law. Unelected = (largely) unaccountable.
What they've confirmed is that there was indeed a warming trend from about 1970 (or so) through about 2000. Before that, nothing significant. Since then, nothing significant. So we have a 30-year period of warming. That's an extremely short period when you're talking climate science. It also inconveniently doesn't match up with carbon dioxide emissions growth.
So the questions remain, as you say: "is it caused by man?" and (if I may paraphrase) "what, if anything, should we do about it?" Those two questions are quite significant, and completely separate from the furor about the earth warming/not warming.
For what it's worth, things still aren't on the up-and-up regarding the data, even in this case.
As a parent of a high-functioning autistic kid, I also enjoy the extra services which are required by federal law. However, I don't agree with the idea that such services are required on a national level. Let the school districts and states compete for the students and their tax dollars. If those services were to go away in my area, I would then need to choose whether to spend the extra time/money/effort to procure those services on my own, or go somewhere else. Why should I feel entitled to it?
I worked hard in high school, got good grades, and got some scholarships. That paid for a good portion of my schooling. I also worked a part-time job during the school year and got a much-higher-than-minimum-wage internship each summer, working full time. And I chose a cheaper-than average university. And I graduated with no debt.
You're making an assumption that the Federal Government is the only entity out there which funds schools, parks, urban development, and infrastructure. In the process, you're forgetting the several layers of government which could arguably do a more effective, efficient, and accountable job of administering those same functions: states, counties and municipalities. I, for one, would welcome the elimination of the Department of Education on the Federal level--I don't see it causing any actual improvement in our education system for the billions we spend on it, and it only insulates decisions from the voters it affects.
The same goes for HUD. Why must this kind of issue be managed on the federal level? Wouldn't the state and local governments be better informed and more invested in having an effective outcome?
Sure, houses are more expensive now than they were 40 years ago. They're also bigger (2700 sq ft today vs 1400 sq ft in 1970) and better-made, with more features. The cost of building the same house today that was the average 40 years ago hasn't changed nearly that amount. In addition, minimum wage makes for an absolutely useless measure of average household income. The ratio of median home price to median income (a much more useful statistic) has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, and if you ignore the housing bubble, the ratio increased from 3:1 to about 4:1. That hardly constitutes a tripling of housing price/income ratio; in fact, it means that price per square foot has dropped.
I worked through college. My parents paid for my transportation to and from school and for phone calls home, but other than that, I was on my own. I'm now 30, and have a very good paying job (I'm in the top 20% income-wise). It's possible, but you gotta 1) choose the right school, 2) choose a useful major, and 3) work your tail off, all which requirements are increasingly ignored. It's also worth pointing out that the perception of a college education has created (in my opinion) a bit of a bubble. Just like the housing bubble, people are investing ridiculous sums of money into something which doesn't have near that amount of value. You can point the blame in any number of directions--at parents for pushing kids into college when the kid isn't made out for it, at the kids for choosing majors which provide no marketable skills, at colleges for helping perpetuate the perception that a college education is necessary to lead a comfortable life (and who can blame them, from a marketing perspective?), or at the government for artificially inflating demand by guaranteeing loans a ridiculously low interest rates.
There are still LOTS of good-paying, non-college-degree-requiring jobs out there. The trades particularly are (and have been for some time) suffering from a shortage. Plumbers, electricians, welders, and the like. A good welder with his own equipment can make a very nice living.