Pretty much everyone I know who is extremely wealthy ($250k/yr+ including three guys making over $1 million/yr) is a workaholic. If they find they have some free time, they don't go to the beach or watch TV or read slashdot like you and I would do. They use it to do more work. Whether that's their personality or because they just happened to find a job they love to do, they enjoy working so much that their spouses have a hard time dragging them away from it long enough just to go on vacation with the kids. That's what the wife of one of the $1+ million/yr guys complained to me about when I stayed at their house for a weekend. She kept having to pull phones, tablets, laptops out of his hands during their vacation because he kept trying to work. Eventually she conceded and let him work for a few hours each evening back at the hotel, in exchange for him not doing anything work-related the rest of the day while they were sightseeing with the kids.
Most people probably believe rich people are like the stereotype of the fat cat banker who works 4 hours and takes off to play golf the rest of the day, because that's what they fantasize being rich is like. But the rich people I've met are the exact opposite of that. Another of the over $1 million/yr persons I know epitomizes TFA. His family (landlord for my business) owns a good chunk of the land in Southern California and they probably pull in several hundred $million/yr in lease and rental fees. It's all passive income so they don't have to lift a finger, but he works pro bono as an accountant for the city he lives in, often putting in 10-12 hour workdays. (The third one works 8 hr/day at his law practice, then goes home and helps run his wife's business the rest of the evening.)
"Disorientated" is the British English form of the American English "disoriented." Kinda like they call it al-u-min-i-um vs our a-lu-min-um. I guess at some point Americans figured a lot of these extra syllables were superfluous and got rid of them.
While that's true, the real problem is that we are expecting perfect behavior from imperfect actors. Everyone is human, everyone makes mistakes, everyone has breaking points that they can reach if they're pushed.
After watching politics (and the news) for 30+ years, I don't think simply having the media expose this sort of illicit or illegal behavior is enough. It just reinforces the misguided belief that things would've turned out different if we'd only had "better people" in place. Once you fall down that trap, the people who look most qualified are those who are most skilled at covering up their faults - pathological liars. And after decades of media pressure and filtering, that's precisely what most surviving politicians are.
The safeguards need to be more structural. If you're going to build a reliable organization using these flawed building blocks, you can't just throw out every block which has failed when in fact every block can fail under individually unique circumstances. You have to build the structure to be robust enough to survive and do its job in spite of failures. Like how we've taken the notoriously imprecise and inconsistent feat of generating microscopic magnetic fields on metal surfaces, and turned them into extremely reliable hard drives by putting a multiple layers of error correction encoding on top of the unreliable lowest encoding layer. (Adding yet another layer using RAID if you need more reliability.) I'm not sure how exactly to translate that into an organization of people, but simply relying on the media to report it is the equivalent of a computer popping up a UAC dialog (requesting admin privilege) for every little thing it does. It happens so often that eventually people get tired of it and simply click OK to every popup, or simply turn the damn thing off.
There are a helluva lot more than 8000 Netgear routers on the Internet, which implies the vulnerability requires you to enable remote (WLAN) admin access on the router for it to be exploited externally. But neither link clarifies if this is the case.
You'd still vulnerable from the LAN side, particularly if someone using your Internet clicks a link with the default IP address of the router coded into the URL. But the first thing I do when I get a new router is change the default IP address precisely to prevent this sort of thing, and to avoid complications from subnet address collisions when setting up VPNs. Usually something in then 10.x.x.x block.
What he's saying (poorly but about typical for someone untrained in the effect of radiation on biology) is that there is no proof that long-term exposure to low levels of radiation is dangerous. That's a huge-ass assumption we've been living with for the last century. We know high doses of radiation are harmful. So we drew a straight line interpolating it down to zero, which leads to the unsubstantiated conclusion that low levels of radiation are also harmful. But we figured better safe than sorry, and set up radiation limits and protocols as if it were true.
Animal population studies from Chernobyl are a mixed bag so far and do not clearly support this conclusion. If it were true that long-term low level radiation were unquestionably harmful, you'd expect to find a clear negative trend. But the trend so far is mixed. So more than likely the effects of long-term low level radiation exposure are much more nuanced - sometimes bad, sometimes neutral, and as the man said, sometimes good. The mathematics of adaptation would seem to bear this out. The rate at which a species can adapt to changing conditions would depend on (1) its rate of reproduction, and (2) the rate of DNA transcription errors induced by radiation. So too much radiation and the organism dies due to biological malfunction. Too little radiation and the species dies due to inability to keep pace with changing environmental conditions.
1 Bq = 1 radioactive decay per second. It's a tiny, tiny amount. For further reference:
The amount of K40 and Rb87 in your body gives off about 4600 Bq.
The K40 (same radioactivity source as in bananas) dissolved in seawater gives off about 12 Bq/L, or about 12,000 Bq per cubic meter. (Cue the alarmists crying that the amount of K40 in your body is static and so we should subtract it. No, you don't subtract it, you divide by it. 0.3 Bq / 4600 = 0.006%. So it's increased the radiation your body normally withstands while staying hale and hearty by 0.006%)
The Rb87 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.11 Bq/L, or about 110 Bq per cubic meter.
The U238 dissolved in seawater gives off about 0.04 Bq/L, or about 40 Bq per cubic meter.
Heck, the amount of Tritium in seawater gives off about 0.0006 Bq/L, or about 0.6 Bq per cubic meter.
A granite countertop gives off about 1000 Bq per kg.
If 0.3 Bq / m^3 were dangerous, you'd be dead ten thousand times over just from the natural radioactivity in your own body, a hundred thousand times over from natural radiation from other sources. These measurements of residual radiation from Fukushima are a testament to how good our instruments are at detecting minute quantities of radiation. Not a sign that our oceans are dangerous.
Wage slavery is never cost effective except for the slave owner. That's what makes it an unstable system which can only be perpetuated by government collusion, or lack of willpower by the employees to break out of slavery. e.g. Detroit used to have slave-level wages. Henry Ford decided to set up shop there and paid his factory workers much more than the prevailing wage. He accidentally discovered that when he paid people a fair wage, not only did their productivity increase, but they used those wages to buy the very product they were helping build. The resulting feedback loop multiplied his company's revenue and turned the Ford Motor Company into the behemoth it is today. No longer were cars affordable only to the privileged elite; the average middle class worker (by Ford factory standards) could afford to buy one.
If the only options you see are being a wage slave or starving to death, then you haven't really tried. A location where the people are being paid slave wages or starving is ripe for a new company to set up shop and hire willing employees for less than they'd have to pay at well-established locations. As more of these people become employed and spend their wages on local merchants, the economy picks up. There are fewer unemployed, resulting in wages increasing. This is how the market equalizes geographic wage inequality. If this isn't happening, then there are fundamental problems with the region not caused by slave wages. Maybe the location is too far from markets, or the highway/railroad access is poor, or people just don't want to live in that location. Unless the government is intentionally keeping business out, low wages are a symptom not a cause.
And yes I've had a rent check bounce. A rent check a tenant gave me. I was stupid and deposited it directly into our payroll bank account since it almost exactly topped off the amount we needed to make payroll. Normally I transfer the payroll money from our primary checking account, but I was lazy and decided to save a little work by depositing the checks directly into payroll. As a result I got charged a bounced check fee, but more importantly a bunch of my employees' paychecks bounced, causing more bounced check fees for both them and myself. The whole thing was a disaster. I called in each employee who was affected, apologized to them in person, and told them to bring in their bank statement so I could reimburse their bounced check fee (or fees if they then wrote checks which bounced). The ones who needed the money immediately, I paid in cash out of my own pocket. All told it was over $1300 in bank fees incurred because I was stupid/lazy, and because the person who wrote the first check did so knowing he didn't have enough money to cover it but thought it would be easier turning his problem into my problem.
It's cliche, but it's true. Your employees are your most valuable asset. A good business will do everything it can to protect them and to retain them. A business which pays slave wages is just ripe to be squeezed out by a business which will pay better (fair) wages. The only way a slave wage business can stay in business is if the government is blocking competing businesses, or if people like you have so discouraged others with your gloom and doom hopeless corporate feudalism talk that they don't even bother trying to start up their own business to compete.
The tax deduction isn't money you get back from the government. It's the government saying they wont' tax the income you ended up donating to charity. As such, there is no difference between the company "giving" you the money to donate (counts as income on your taxes) and you getting the tax write-off (government doesn't tax that income), vs the company donating the money in your name (doesn't count as income, you don't get a tax deduction).
e.g. Say I'm at the 25% tax bracket. Company gives me $4000 to donate to a charity, which I do. Come tax time, the government says you received $4000 in income from your company so you owe $1000 in taxes. But you say I donated that $4000 to charity. The extra $4000 gets erased (deducted) from your income, and you're no longer liable for the $1000 in taxes. It's as if you never received the money at all, and the company gave it directly to the charity instead of to you. (Except if the company had given it, they would get the $4000 deduction to reflect that the money was donated. But that just equalizes the direct donation scenario to if they had paid it to you $4000 as wages - a deductible expense. Rather than kept it as taxable profit. Either way, the government is not taxing the money that changed hands because the final recipient is a charity.)
So it doesn't matter whether the company or the employee gets the deduction - it works out the same either way. (There are rare instances where the tax law is specifically or accidentally crafted to give you a tax deduction even though you never received the income. I ran across one of these a couple years back when i donated some stock to a charity. I received a deduction as if I'd sold the stock thus receiving the proceeds as taxable income, then donated the money to the charity. Except since I never sold the stock, I didn't have any taxable income to report for this stock. True, I had paid taxes on the money I used to first buy the stock, but the stock had appreciated a considerable amount and my deduction was actually several times larger than my initial cash outlay to buy the stock. So these situations are not impossible. But they are the exception to how deductions work, not the norm.)
Presidents don't make tax law. They give a suggestion to Congress, and Congress does whatever the hell it wants. The luxury tax was passed by a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. Bush was forced to sign it because the Democrats refused to pass a budget which didn't include a tax increase (leaving Bush no choice but to go back on his "read my lips - no new taxes" pledge).
Clinton repealed it because by then it was obvious it was killing the industries it effected (e.g. yacht sales plummeted and boat manufacturers were laying off workers - yacht construction is one of the few industries where it's relatively expensive to outsource the labor because you can't just put the end product on a bulk cargo ship for cheap transport from Asia). And the Republicans managed to gain control of the Senate thus preventing Democrat legislators from unilaterally dictating tax policy.
At this point, I suspect most of the people hanging on to theirs are doing so in the hopes that in 20 years it'll be extremely valuable because of its rarity. Trying to disable it over the network is going to accomplish nothing because these units are turned off, packed back in their original box, and sealed in shrink wrap or a ziploc bag.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
I was on a Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Germany in 2006. They announced that since Boeing had decided to shut down Connexion, they were opening up the WiFi aboard the plane for everyone to use for free. I fired up my laptop while over the middle of the Atlantic, and used the service to VPN into my office. Got some work done, sent a few emails, and printed a quick document exclaiming in bold "I'm printing this from a plane in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!!!!' just for the folks in the office. I also logged into a MMO for a bit. The lag was too much to really do any combat, but I chatted with guild members about where I was playing from. Alas I had to shut down at that point because I'd drained my battery and they didn't yet have charging ports outside of first class.
I haven't tried the newer WiFi service aboard planes. But based on what you're saying, it sounds like the service is somehow worse than what Boeing had a decade ago and shut down because not enough airlines were interested?
That's the perfect market efficiency method of matching supply with demand - adjust the price until the two match.
The performers who give converts frequently prefer to deliberately mismatch supply and demand. By underpricing the tickets, demand exceeds supply and you end up with lines and shortages. This sort of mismatch (insufficient supply) is a problem with essentials like food (or the long lines for toilet paper that the Soviet Union was famous for). But since concerts are almost always entertainment, they're nonessentials so this mismatch isn't a problem. You don't die or starve (or have dirty underwear) because you were unlucky and didn't manage to get a concert ticket.
So the performers consider the drawbacks of this type of mismatch to be acceptable if it means their fans are able to attend at a lower price if they're fortunate enough to get a ticket. Basically, the performers are willingly leaving money on the table in order to give fans a lower ticket price.
Scalpers try to take advantage of this market mismatch to scoop up some of that money performers are leaving on the table. They either deprive legit fans from a ticket, or force them to have to pay a higher price than the performer set. If there are enough scalpers or their methods of obtaining tickets are sophisticated enough, they could conceivably elbow legit fans completely out of the opportunity to buy tickets.
Laws are not a very good way to try to thwart scalping. The best method is to enforce the non-transferable legal restriction of the ticket sale. e.g. Attach a name to each ticket and require people to show ID when they present their ticket for entry, like the airlines do. This is essentially what companies do when they lower the price on a product with a rebate. If they just dropped the in-store price, ebayers would buy up the entire stock and sell it on eBay at close to the original price. But offering the discount via a rebate which is limited to x submissions per address prevents the biggest abusers. An ebayer might be able to buy a few extra of the product using a work address and relatives' addresses. But it's a lot of hassle and the long turnaround time for the rebate means they'll be out of the capital for a while. So the rebate, while mildly annoying to the legit buyer, makes flipping impractical for the ebayer, thus helping guarantee it's the end-user who enjoys the discounted price provided by the rebate.
My wife and I got a chuckle out of the young security guard that was with him. When people asked who he was, he said that he was the worlds oldest astronaut.
You misunderstood what the security guard meant. Glenn was the oldest person to ever go into space when he flew aboard Discovery on STS-95 in 1998. He was 77.
There's no pre-empting going on. Apple is not the originator of these ideas - they may be talking about adding them to the next iPhone, but Android has had them for close to 7 years. My Samsung Galaxy S (the first one they made) didn't have physical navigation buttons - it had capacitive touch buttons and used the phone's vibrate module to generate haptic feedback. The navigation buttons were simply a separate touch-sensitive OLED display. Heck, my current Nexus 5 does the same thing except the buttons are part of the main display (has been since Android Honeycomb).
The media is just dominated by Apple fans who refuse to tell the truth and say that Apple is copying Android with these "new" ideas, or who have never taken a serious look outside the iOS ecosystem so they have no idea what else has been available for close to a decade.
This exactly. You don't go out to eat at a fancy restaurant because the food is worth $40 a plate. You do it because of its value as a shared social experience with your SO, a date, your family or friends. Likewise, a movie on its own is not worth the $10-$15 a theater charges for a seat. Most of its value comes afterwards, from your ability to talk about it with other people who've seen it. Same goes for broadcast TV shows and live sporting events - the synchronized mass consumption is what makes them the topic of conversation around the water cooler the next day.
In that respect, an early rental would work for someone like me. My family room has a projector with 130" screen and a 7.1 speaker system, I could invite some friends over and we could watch a newly released movie together without the lines and screaming kids (or for the friends who have screaming kids, we can pause the movie until the kids stop screaming). But I suspect only a small minority of people have a setup like mine. If all you've got is a 42" TV with built-in speakers, what's the point? You spend all your alone time in your house already. If you're gonna hang out and do something together with your friends, you probably want to do it outside the house. Not to pay $25-$50 to watch a new release movie like it was a TV show.
I should add that I do use my home theater system in this manner. It's a lot of trouble to try to keep track of a herd of kids in a dark room, and embarrassing when one of them has a meltdown in public. So my friends and I do regularly get together with our kids for mass viewings of kids movies on my home theater. But here's the rub - the studios are putting out too many movies. We simply don't have the time to watch them all in this manner. So we're still trying to catch up on the better movies released a few months ago which are now on HBO or Netflix. There's little point watching a current new release for $25-$50 when we can watch as part of our subscription package a movie which was a new release a few months ago that we haven't yet had time to see. Saves us money, and helps us filter out the stinkers and bombs.
Deflation is worse than inflation. Inflation devalues your savings, thus encouraging (forcing) you to go out there are do more work to earn more money (generate more productivity). Deflation increases the value of your savings, thus discouraging you from working - why bother doing something productive when the money you have stuffed under your mattress is increasing in value enough to pay for your living expenses?
Currencies are stable when the money supply expands at about the same rate as the productivity of the country's citizens (basically GDP - a combination of population growth and increased productivity due to technological advances). That causes prices to remain stable when measured in the currency. Ideally, a government with a fiat currency moderates their money supply to slightly exceed this productivity growth rate, which causes a slight amount of inflation (prices slowly climb). Yes it's true that when a government screws things up (e.g. Venezuela right now), it can cause massive problems. But like regular oil changes for your car, there's a huge incentive for all governments to maintain their own economy.
The whole reason we abandoned the gold standard is that it's really stupid to base your economy's health on the gamble that the amount of gold miners dug out of the ground each year would match the rate of growth of your country's GDP. Historically, the amount of gold mined each year did not keep pace with economic growth, resulting in deflation, which led to higher economic instability. If you look at the history of recessions in the U.S., in the 45 years since 1971 when we went off the gold standard, there have been 6 recessions, or 1 per 7.5 years. In the 45 years prior (1926-1971) there were 9 recessions, or 1 per 5 years. The 50 years before that (1875-1925) saw 13 recessions, or 1 per 3.8 years. And the 50 years before that (1825-1875) saw 13 recessions as well. The amount of economic contraction during recessions has also been smaller since we went off the gold standard.
Unfortunately, bitcoin perpetuates this stupidity. Its value is based on (1) the rate at which people are able to "mine" bitcoins by solving increasingly difficult math problems, and (2) its total supply is capped at about 21 million coins. The very fact that bitcoins are appreciating in value is evidence that it's a terrible choice of a currency. You want the prices of staple goods to remain relatively stable in a currency. Instead, bitcoins are so deflationary that early adopters are literally able to live off of bitcoins they've stuffed under the mattress, instead of actually doing any productive work. A currency which enables that behavior is fatal to an economy. I'm not saying all crypto-currencies are flawed, or that there's no benefit to taking a currency out of government control. Only that bitcoin is fatally flawed in that it accomplishes the latter in the worst possible way. The huge increase in the value of bitcoins since its inception is not an indicator of its strength, it's an indicator of its unsuitability as a currency. It proves that bitcoin is incapable of scaling properly with the number of people using it (productivity growth due to population increase). In that respect it's more like real estate - where people who were born earlier were able to buy up most of it cheaply, leaving the current generation unable to afford to buy a home.
Samsung's lawyers hit the nail on the head in their argument before the Supreme Court. Allowing the lower court rulings to stand would award the owner of a cup holder patent the entire profit from the sale of an 18-wheeler big rig truck just because it used the infringing cup holder design.
I can see an argument for awarding slightly more of the profit than is attributable to the single component (having the infringing feature allowed you to make sales which you wouldn't have made). But awarding all the profit is insane. If that's the standard you're going to use, then Apple should just hand over all their profit from their iPhones 1 through 4 to Samsung, because they infringed one of Samsung's FRAND patents. Apple escaped punishment for that only because Obama used executive privilege to nullify that ITC decision.
LCDs don't work like that. They work by orienting two polarizers. The first is a fixed polarizer, which cuts the backlight's brightness to 50% and polarizes the light. The second is a polarizing liquid crystal layer whose orientation can be controlled electronically. Orient it parallel to the fixed polarizer and all the light going through the fixed polarizer is let through. Orient it perpendicular and it blocks (in theory) all the light going through. (In practice the polarizing is not perfect, so there's a little leakage. Which is why black pixels are not entirely black on an LCD.
However, adding a third polarizer does not help. At best, the same amount of light is blocked as with two polarizers perpendicular to each other. At worst, it allows more light to go through than two polarizers.
Whatever extra layer they're using, it's not a polarizer, so it can't be an LCD. It's probably some sort of electrochromic glass whose reflectivity (and thus opacity) can be controlled electrically. And they've figured out a way to divide the effect into zones which coincide with the pixels or groupings of pixels on the LCD. It probably doesn't have as much fine granularity of partial opacity as an LCD does (else they could just use it instead of LCDs since LCDs always block at least 50% of the backlight), LCDs have gotten good enough to where we can use them to generate 1024 shades (10-bit, though most panels are still 8-bit or 6-bit), while last I heard electrochromic glass was binary.
If TFA is correct, then Samsung tried to put the largest battery possible while keeping the phone as thin as possible. If they wanted more profit, they could've gone with a smaller battery or a thicker design with larger tolerances. Both would've been cheaper for them to manufacture and thus would've increased their profit margin. But they eschewed that marginal profit and went the extra mile for the customer - packing in the largest battery possible while keeping the phone as small and thin as possible. Unfortunately they went too far, to the point where it compromised the safety of the device.
If I had to guess, they probably goofed because this was only their second gen all-metal design. They didn't have the experience to tell them how tight was too tight (at least not until now). They could pack the battery this tightly on their older plastic bodies without problems because battery expansion would just push the rear plastic shell up a little.
Yup. If knowing the outcome is what's important, then you only need to watch the last 5-10 seconds of the event; you can skip everything that comes before. Heck, you can skip watching it entirely and just catch the score on a sports news website.
OTOH if the parts before the end of the game have entertainment value, then it doesn't matter if you know the outcome in advance, and there's no need to watch it live. The only benefit of watching it live is that it's easier to find other people who haven't seen it that you can watch it with.
You're assuming his status and success is due to privilege, not due to ability and effort. You're making this assumption based on his race and gender, not his individual circumstances. That is the definition of racism and sexism. Exactly the same as assuming a black college student is there only due to affirmative action.
Nearly all my entire extended family immigrated into the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, Korea was a backwater and afraid of all its wealthy citizens emigrating, so it passed a law that each emigrating family was only allowed to take roughly $1500 worth of money and valuables with them. So every one of our families (about a dozen) started in the U.S. with a net value of $1500 - no job, no house, no car, little or no English language capability, and no contacts among the privileged white "elite". I was only 4 when we moved here but I remember - we lived in a government low-income apartment, and scoured garage sales and the Salvation Army store for basics like dishes and cutlery. All my clothes as a child were from second-hand stores - nothing new.
Today, only one of these original families is lower class (the father refuses to get a job and is content to live off government assistance and the mother's meager income). Everyone else has managed to carve out middle class ($25k+/yr) or better lives, most in the top third ($65k+/yr). Three are upper class ($150k+/yr, or top 5%), the most successful of whom owns a multi-million dollar cell phone store chain they founded (a 1%er). Among our second generation (myself and about 30 cousins), one was middle class but is now in prison, one (child of the one lower class family) is lower class but just got his nursing degree and a job offer at a salary that would put him in the top third, one has mental health issues but falls into the middle class when he can hold a job. The rest of us are middle class or higher, with 6 being upper class ($150k+/yr).
This "privilege" you speak of either doesn't exist or has nowhere near the amount of influence on people's lives that you think it does. If you put in the time and effort, chances are that you can succeed regardless of your starting social and financial status. The only statistical deviation from the U.S. norm that jumps out in my family is that over half of us started our own business after we'd saved up some money, rather than were content to remain employees. I think that was due to not understanding pensions, Social Security, nor investing in stocks, so we sought the only other obvious way to assure an income in retirement. But it seems to have worked in our favor.
Last week, a burglar pried apart some security bars at my business and squeezed in. He was able to make off with some stolen goods because once inside, he was easily able to open the locked exit door. Fire codes require that all building exit doors accessible to the public be openable from the inside even when locked. These laws were made after repeated fires with huge death tolls exacerbated by locked exit doors. That's what the bar on the door you press when leaving most restaurants and stores does. Even when the door is locked, pushing the bar from the inside will open the door. That way if a fire breaks out, you're not trapped inside because the only person who has the key was the idiot who started the fire and is dead.
Same thing with refrigerators - both the old stand-up units which latched shut, and walk-in refrigerator/freezers used in restaurants. Too many people (especially kids playing) were dying after being trapped inside, that laws were passed requiring a mechanism which allows someone inside to open the latch on the outside.
I don't see why cars should be any different. Yes easy egress makes thievery easier. But preventing that is just not worth the potential loss of life. Any car designer who thinks this is a good idea should be locked inside one of their cars on a sunny day until they admit it's a terrible idea. Heck, after dozens of kids dying each year after being locked in the trunk of a car while playing, we finally passed a law mandating a release mechanism inside the trunk. And some idiot car designer decides it would be a good idea to make it impossible for someone inside the passenger compartment to exit at will? Shame on BMW for trying to spin this to the press as a "helpful" feature.
Speaking as a former merchant, the billing address, security code, expiration date* aren't required to process a credit card transaction. They're tools the credit card companies give merchants to help prevent fraud (while simultaneously passing laws prohibiting merchants from requiring credit card users to show ID to prove it's actually their card**).
The way it works is that if you're a merchant and you accept a fraudulent/stolen card, the onus is on you to prove that to the best of your knowledge the transaction was legit. The main way this is done is by validating the signature on the receipt matches the signature the card company has on file. When you accept a card, you're supposed to check the signature on the back of the card to insure it matches the signature on the receipt. If the cardholder requests a chargeback and the signature doesn't match, it's instantly game over - the merchant loses and the card company grants the chargeback.
If it sorta matches or (for online purchases) there is no signature, then it falls onto these secondary security measures. The more data the merchant collected which correctly matches the info the card company has on file (security code, expiration date, billing address, phone number, cardholder's birthdate, I think that's all) the better the chances the merchant will win against a chargeback. So it's in the best interests of the merchant to collect as much info as possible to protect themsevles. But on the flip side if you try to collect too much info you make the transaction more annoying for the cardholder, and risk alienating them so they go make their purchase elsewhere. Or (for brick and mortar purchases) you slow down the checkout line forcing you to hire more cashiers and add more cash registers. So the merchant picks the amount of security they're comfortable with. I've always wondered what happens if someone sets up a fake merchant account, runs a bunch of fraudulent transactions without any security checks, then absconds with the money and closes the bank account once the credit card has wired the payments, before any of the cardholders can notice and request chargebacks.
There are some other ways to get fake credit card transaction to go through that I fell victim to about 10 years ago when I lost one of my cards. I promptly called to report the card lost/stolen and figured that was that. But reviewing my card statements, I noticed a fraudulent charge on the second statement after I'd gotten a new card with a new number. After some discussion with the card company, I learned that (1) as of 2007 they still allowed carbon copy credit card transactions. Older readers may recall the credit card machines used before phone and Internet credit card machines. They'd take your card, put it in the machine, put a carbon copy form on top of it, then run a roller over the card to imprint it onto the carbon copy paper. One copy became the customer's receipt, the other the merchants. The merchant would then mail these in for processing and to receive payment. Because of the time delay, the credit card companies would continue to process these even if they were received after the card had been canceled.
"But the date on the fraudulent transaction is after I reported my card lost/stolen. Why was it still processed?" I asked. (2) The thief had processed it as a subscription service. Apparently when people have a card stolen they frequently forget to update their magazine subscriptions with the new card info. The credit card companies got tired of getting into 3-way arguments about canceled subscriptions because the payment was denied due to the card being canceled. So if the transaction is coded as payment for a subscription, the card company will "helpfully" forward the charge to the new card even if the charge was processed using the account's old (stolen) card number.
* (I don't think expiration date is required, but this was a decade ago so I don't recall exactly.)
Instead of bio-engineering an organism which collects sunlight and uses it to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, why don't we just plant more trees?
I understand that you're upset that we're not doing more about CO2 emissions. But you have to understand that we're directly in control of those CO2 emissions. If we wanted to, we could stop all our CO2 emissions tomorrow. The problem isn't the capability, it's the desire. We already have the capability, we just lack the desire.
Releasing a self-replicating bio-engineered organism which extracts CO2 from the atmosphere is an order of magnitude more reckless than wantonly emitting CO2 to generate energy. Because once you release a self-replicating organism, you no longer have any control over it. If it turns out our calculations and predictions are wrong about the effects of reducing our CO2 emissions, we can modify our behavior in response because we control our CO2 emissions. But once you release that organism, that's it. It's out of our control. If our calculations were wrong about what the steady state response of the ecosystem will be to the introduction of that organism, we won't be able to stop it even if we desire to do so.
At least with trees, you have an organism which has been around for millions of years so its steady state effect on the ecosystem is pretty well understood.
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Pretty much everyone I know who is extremely wealthy ($250k/yr+ including three guys making over $1 million/yr) is a workaholic. If they find they have some free time, they don't go to the beach or watch TV or read slashdot like you and I would do. They use it to do more work. Whether that's their personality or because they just happened to find a job they love to do, they enjoy working so much that their spouses have a hard time dragging them away from it long enough just to go on vacation with the kids. That's what the wife of one of the $1+ million/yr guys complained to me about when I stayed at their house for a weekend. She kept having to pull phones, tablets, laptops out of his hands during their vacation because he kept trying to work. Eventually she conceded and let him work for a few hours each evening back at the hotel, in exchange for him not doing anything work-related the rest of the day while they were sightseeing with the kids.
Most people probably believe rich people are like the stereotype of the fat cat banker who works 4 hours and takes off to play golf the rest of the day, because that's what they fantasize being rich is like. But the rich people I've met are the exact opposite of that. Another of the over $1 million/yr persons I know epitomizes TFA. His family (landlord for my business) owns a good chunk of the land in Southern California and they probably pull in several hundred $million/yr in lease and rental fees. It's all passive income so they don't have to lift a finger, but he works pro bono as an accountant for the city he lives in, often putting in 10-12 hour workdays. (The third one works 8 hr/day at his law practice, then goes home and helps run his wife's business the rest of the evening.)
"Disorientated" is the British English form of the American English "disoriented." Kinda like they call it al-u-min-i-um vs our a-lu-min-um. I guess at some point Americans figured a lot of these extra syllables were superfluous and got rid of them.
While that's true, the real problem is that we are expecting perfect behavior from imperfect actors. Everyone is human, everyone makes mistakes, everyone has breaking points that they can reach if they're pushed.
After watching politics (and the news) for 30+ years, I don't think simply having the media expose this sort of illicit or illegal behavior is enough. It just reinforces the misguided belief that things would've turned out different if we'd only had "better people" in place. Once you fall down that trap, the people who look most qualified are those who are most skilled at covering up their faults - pathological liars. And after decades of media pressure and filtering, that's precisely what most surviving politicians are.
The safeguards need to be more structural. If you're going to build a reliable organization using these flawed building blocks, you can't just throw out every block which has failed when in fact every block can fail under individually unique circumstances. You have to build the structure to be robust enough to survive and do its job in spite of failures. Like how we've taken the notoriously imprecise and inconsistent feat of generating microscopic magnetic fields on metal surfaces, and turned them into extremely reliable hard drives by putting a multiple layers of error correction encoding on top of the unreliable lowest encoding layer. (Adding yet another layer using RAID if you need more reliability.) I'm not sure how exactly to translate that into an organization of people, but simply relying on the media to report it is the equivalent of a computer popping up a UAC dialog (requesting admin privilege) for every little thing it does. It happens so often that eventually people get tired of it and simply click OK to every popup, or simply turn the damn thing off.
There are a helluva lot more than 8000 Netgear routers on the Internet, which implies the vulnerability requires you to enable remote (WLAN) admin access on the router for it to be exploited externally. But neither link clarifies if this is the case.
You'd still vulnerable from the LAN side, particularly if someone using your Internet clicks a link with the default IP address of the router coded into the URL. But the first thing I do when I get a new router is change the default IP address precisely to prevent this sort of thing, and to avoid complications from subnet address collisions when setting up VPNs. Usually something in then 10.x.x.x block.
What he's saying (poorly but about typical for someone untrained in the effect of radiation on biology) is that there is no proof that long-term exposure to low levels of radiation is dangerous. That's a huge-ass assumption we've been living with for the last century. We know high doses of radiation are harmful. So we drew a straight line interpolating it down to zero, which leads to the unsubstantiated conclusion that low levels of radiation are also harmful. But we figured better safe than sorry, and set up radiation limits and protocols as if it were true.
Animal population studies from Chernobyl are a mixed bag so far and do not clearly support this conclusion. If it were true that long-term low level radiation were unquestionably harmful, you'd expect to find a clear negative trend. But the trend so far is mixed. So more than likely the effects of long-term low level radiation exposure are much more nuanced - sometimes bad, sometimes neutral, and as the man said, sometimes good. The mathematics of adaptation would seem to bear this out. The rate at which a species can adapt to changing conditions would depend on (1) its rate of reproduction, and (2) the rate of DNA transcription errors induced by radiation. So too much radiation and the organism dies due to biological malfunction. Too little radiation and the species dies due to inability to keep pace with changing environmental conditions.
If 0.3 Bq / m^3 were dangerous, you'd be dead ten thousand times over just from the natural radioactivity in your own body, a hundred thousand times over from natural radiation from other sources. These measurements of residual radiation from Fukushima are a testament to how good our instruments are at detecting minute quantities of radiation. Not a sign that our oceans are dangerous.
Wage slavery is never cost effective except for the slave owner. That's what makes it an unstable system which can only be perpetuated by government collusion, or lack of willpower by the employees to break out of slavery. e.g. Detroit used to have slave-level wages. Henry Ford decided to set up shop there and paid his factory workers much more than the prevailing wage. He accidentally discovered that when he paid people a fair wage, not only did their productivity increase, but they used those wages to buy the very product they were helping build. The resulting feedback loop multiplied his company's revenue and turned the Ford Motor Company into the behemoth it is today. No longer were cars affordable only to the privileged elite; the average middle class worker (by Ford factory standards) could afford to buy one.
If the only options you see are being a wage slave or starving to death, then you haven't really tried. A location where the people are being paid slave wages or starving is ripe for a new company to set up shop and hire willing employees for less than they'd have to pay at well-established locations. As more of these people become employed and spend their wages on local merchants, the economy picks up. There are fewer unemployed, resulting in wages increasing. This is how the market equalizes geographic wage inequality. If this isn't happening, then there are fundamental problems with the region not caused by slave wages. Maybe the location is too far from markets, or the highway/railroad access is poor, or people just don't want to live in that location. Unless the government is intentionally keeping business out, low wages are a symptom not a cause.
And yes I've had a rent check bounce. A rent check a tenant gave me. I was stupid and deposited it directly into our payroll bank account since it almost exactly topped off the amount we needed to make payroll. Normally I transfer the payroll money from our primary checking account, but I was lazy and decided to save a little work by depositing the checks directly into payroll. As a result I got charged a bounced check fee, but more importantly a bunch of my employees' paychecks bounced, causing more bounced check fees for both them and myself. The whole thing was a disaster. I called in each employee who was affected, apologized to them in person, and told them to bring in their bank statement so I could reimburse their bounced check fee (or fees if they then wrote checks which bounced). The ones who needed the money immediately, I paid in cash out of my own pocket. All told it was over $1300 in bank fees incurred because I was stupid/lazy, and because the person who wrote the first check did so knowing he didn't have enough money to cover it but thought it would be easier turning his problem into my problem.
It's cliche, but it's true. Your employees are your most valuable asset. A good business will do everything it can to protect them and to retain them. A business which pays slave wages is just ripe to be squeezed out by a business which will pay better (fair) wages. The only way a slave wage business can stay in business is if the government is blocking competing businesses, or if people like you have so discouraged others with your gloom and doom hopeless corporate feudalism talk that they don't even bother trying to start up their own business to compete.
The tax deduction isn't money you get back from the government. It's the government saying they wont' tax the income you ended up donating to charity. As such, there is no difference between the company "giving" you the money to donate (counts as income on your taxes) and you getting the tax write-off (government doesn't tax that income), vs the company donating the money in your name (doesn't count as income, you don't get a tax deduction).
e.g. Say I'm at the 25% tax bracket. Company gives me $4000 to donate to a charity, which I do. Come tax time, the government says you received $4000 in income from your company so you owe $1000 in taxes. But you say I donated that $4000 to charity. The extra $4000 gets erased (deducted) from your income, and you're no longer liable for the $1000 in taxes. It's as if you never received the money at all, and the company gave it directly to the charity instead of to you. (Except if the company had given it, they would get the $4000 deduction to reflect that the money was donated. But that just equalizes the direct donation scenario to if they had paid it to you $4000 as wages - a deductible expense. Rather than kept it as taxable profit. Either way, the government is not taxing the money that changed hands because the final recipient is a charity.)
So it doesn't matter whether the company or the employee gets the deduction - it works out the same either way. (There are rare instances where the tax law is specifically or accidentally crafted to give you a tax deduction even though you never received the income. I ran across one of these a couple years back when i donated some stock to a charity. I received a deduction as if I'd sold the stock thus receiving the proceeds as taxable income, then donated the money to the charity. Except since I never sold the stock, I didn't have any taxable income to report for this stock. True, I had paid taxes on the money I used to first buy the stock, but the stock had appreciated a considerable amount and my deduction was actually several times larger than my initial cash outlay to buy the stock. So these situations are not impossible. But they are the exception to how deductions work, not the norm.)
Presidents don't make tax law. They give a suggestion to Congress, and Congress does whatever the hell it wants. The luxury tax was passed by a Democrat-controlled House and Senate. Bush was forced to sign it because the Democrats refused to pass a budget which didn't include a tax increase (leaving Bush no choice but to go back on his "read my lips - no new taxes" pledge).
Clinton repealed it because by then it was obvious it was killing the industries it effected (e.g. yacht sales plummeted and boat manufacturers were laying off workers - yacht construction is one of the few industries where it's relatively expensive to outsource the labor because you can't just put the end product on a bulk cargo ship for cheap transport from Asia). And the Republicans managed to gain control of the Senate thus preventing Democrat legislators from unilaterally dictating tax policy.
At this point, I suspect most of the people hanging on to theirs are doing so in the hopes that in 20 years it'll be extremely valuable because of its rarity. Trying to disable it over the network is going to accomplish nothing because these units are turned off, packed back in their original box, and sealed in shrink wrap or a ziploc bag.
TFA links to some summaries, but some of the categories (particular deaths due to accidents) are aggravatingly unspecific. Alzheimer's and accidents (unintentional injuries) had the largest year-over-year increases, at +4.0 and +2.7 deaths per 100,000. The other causes were all +1.5 or less. The increase in these two exceeded the increases in all the other top-10 combined.
I'm really curious to see what the breakdown for unintentional injury deaths looks like for 2015. We're in the middle of a prescription painkiller addiction epidemic which is going largely unreported by the media. Two years ago, overdoses displaced motor vehicle accidents as the leading cause of accidental death - a position it had held for over a half century. This year we lost more famous people to overdoses than to gun violence, even though the media spent a vastly disproportionate amount of time focusing on the latter. The day of the UCLA shooting (1 murder, 1 suicide), there was a synthetic drug poisoning incident at a concert in Florida which killed 2 and sent 60 to the hospital. But the media concentrated almost entirely on the UCLA shooting.
I was on a Lufthansa flight from Chicago to Germany in 2006. They announced that since Boeing had decided to shut down Connexion, they were opening up the WiFi aboard the plane for everyone to use for free. I fired up my laptop while over the middle of the Atlantic, and used the service to VPN into my office. Got some work done, sent a few emails, and printed a quick document exclaiming in bold "I'm printing this from a plane in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!!!!' just for the folks in the office. I also logged into a MMO for a bit. The lag was too much to really do any combat, but I chatted with guild members about where I was playing from. Alas I had to shut down at that point because I'd drained my battery and they didn't yet have charging ports outside of first class.
I haven't tried the newer WiFi service aboard planes. But based on what you're saying, it sounds like the service is somehow worse than what Boeing had a decade ago and shut down because not enough airlines were interested?
That's the perfect market efficiency method of matching supply with demand - adjust the price until the two match.
The performers who give converts frequently prefer to deliberately mismatch supply and demand. By underpricing the tickets, demand exceeds supply and you end up with lines and shortages. This sort of mismatch (insufficient supply) is a problem with essentials like food (or the long lines for toilet paper that the Soviet Union was famous for). But since concerts are almost always entertainment, they're nonessentials so this mismatch isn't a problem. You don't die or starve (or have dirty underwear) because you were unlucky and didn't manage to get a concert ticket.
So the performers consider the drawbacks of this type of mismatch to be acceptable if it means their fans are able to attend at a lower price if they're fortunate enough to get a ticket. Basically, the performers are willingly leaving money on the table in order to give fans a lower ticket price.
Scalpers try to take advantage of this market mismatch to scoop up some of that money performers are leaving on the table. They either deprive legit fans from a ticket, or force them to have to pay a higher price than the performer set. If there are enough scalpers or their methods of obtaining tickets are sophisticated enough, they could conceivably elbow legit fans completely out of the opportunity to buy tickets.
Laws are not a very good way to try to thwart scalping. The best method is to enforce the non-transferable legal restriction of the ticket sale. e.g. Attach a name to each ticket and require people to show ID when they present their ticket for entry, like the airlines do. This is essentially what companies do when they lower the price on a product with a rebate. If they just dropped the in-store price, ebayers would buy up the entire stock and sell it on eBay at close to the original price. But offering the discount via a rebate which is limited to x submissions per address prevents the biggest abusers. An ebayer might be able to buy a few extra of the product using a work address and relatives' addresses. But it's a lot of hassle and the long turnaround time for the rebate means they'll be out of the capital for a while. So the rebate, while mildly annoying to the legit buyer, makes flipping impractical for the ebayer, thus helping guarantee it's the end-user who enjoys the discounted price provided by the rebate.
You misunderstood what the security guard meant. Glenn was the oldest person to ever go into space when he flew aboard Discovery on STS-95 in 1998. He was 77.
There's no pre-empting going on. Apple is not the originator of these ideas - they may be talking about adding them to the next iPhone, but Android has had them for close to 7 years. My Samsung Galaxy S (the first one they made) didn't have physical navigation buttons - it had capacitive touch buttons and used the phone's vibrate module to generate haptic feedback. The navigation buttons were simply a separate touch-sensitive OLED display. Heck, my current Nexus 5 does the same thing except the buttons are part of the main display (has been since Android Honeycomb).
The media is just dominated by Apple fans who refuse to tell the truth and say that Apple is copying Android with these "new" ideas, or who have never taken a serious look outside the iOS ecosystem so they have no idea what else has been available for close to a decade.
This exactly. You don't go out to eat at a fancy restaurant because the food is worth $40 a plate. You do it because of its value as a shared social experience with your SO, a date, your family or friends. Likewise, a movie on its own is not worth the $10-$15 a theater charges for a seat. Most of its value comes afterwards, from your ability to talk about it with other people who've seen it. Same goes for broadcast TV shows and live sporting events - the synchronized mass consumption is what makes them the topic of conversation around the water cooler the next day.
In that respect, an early rental would work for someone like me. My family room has a projector with 130" screen and a 7.1 speaker system, I could invite some friends over and we could watch a newly released movie together without the lines and screaming kids (or for the friends who have screaming kids, we can pause the movie until the kids stop screaming). But I suspect only a small minority of people have a setup like mine. If all you've got is a 42" TV with built-in speakers, what's the point? You spend all your alone time in your house already. If you're gonna hang out and do something together with your friends, you probably want to do it outside the house. Not to pay $25-$50 to watch a new release movie like it was a TV show.
I should add that I do use my home theater system in this manner. It's a lot of trouble to try to keep track of a herd of kids in a dark room, and embarrassing when one of them has a meltdown in public. So my friends and I do regularly get together with our kids for mass viewings of kids movies on my home theater. But here's the rub - the studios are putting out too many movies. We simply don't have the time to watch them all in this manner. So we're still trying to catch up on the better movies released a few months ago which are now on HBO or Netflix. There's little point watching a current new release for $25-$50 when we can watch as part of our subscription package a movie which was a new release a few months ago that we haven't yet had time to see. Saves us money, and helps us filter out the stinkers and bombs.
Deflation is worse than inflation. Inflation devalues your savings, thus encouraging (forcing) you to go out there are do more work to earn more money (generate more productivity). Deflation increases the value of your savings, thus discouraging you from working - why bother doing something productive when the money you have stuffed under your mattress is increasing in value enough to pay for your living expenses?
Currencies are stable when the money supply expands at about the same rate as the productivity of the country's citizens (basically GDP - a combination of population growth and increased productivity due to technological advances). That causes prices to remain stable when measured in the currency. Ideally, a government with a fiat currency moderates their money supply to slightly exceed this productivity growth rate, which causes a slight amount of inflation (prices slowly climb). Yes it's true that when a government screws things up (e.g. Venezuela right now), it can cause massive problems. But like regular oil changes for your car, there's a huge incentive for all governments to maintain their own economy.
The whole reason we abandoned the gold standard is that it's really stupid to base your economy's health on the gamble that the amount of gold miners dug out of the ground each year would match the rate of growth of your country's GDP. Historically, the amount of gold mined each year did not keep pace with economic growth, resulting in deflation, which led to higher economic instability. If you look at the history of recessions in the U.S., in the 45 years since 1971 when we went off the gold standard, there have been 6 recessions, or 1 per 7.5 years. In the 45 years prior (1926-1971) there were 9 recessions, or 1 per 5 years. The 50 years before that (1875-1925) saw 13 recessions, or 1 per 3.8 years. And the 50 years before that (1825-1875) saw 13 recessions as well. The amount of economic contraction during recessions has also been smaller since we went off the gold standard.
Unfortunately, bitcoin perpetuates this stupidity. Its value is based on (1) the rate at which people are able to "mine" bitcoins by solving increasingly difficult math problems, and (2) its total supply is capped at about 21 million coins. The very fact that bitcoins are appreciating in value is evidence that it's a terrible choice of a currency. You want the prices of staple goods to remain relatively stable in a currency. Instead, bitcoins are so deflationary that early adopters are literally able to live off of bitcoins they've stuffed under the mattress, instead of actually doing any productive work. A currency which enables that behavior is fatal to an economy. I'm not saying all crypto-currencies are flawed, or that there's no benefit to taking a currency out of government control. Only that bitcoin is fatally flawed in that it accomplishes the latter in the worst possible way. The huge increase in the value of bitcoins since its inception is not an indicator of its strength, it's an indicator of its unsuitability as a currency. It proves that bitcoin is incapable of scaling properly with the number of people using it (productivity growth due to population increase). In that respect it's more like real estate - where people who were born earlier were able to buy up most of it cheaply, leaving the current generation unable to afford to buy a home.
Samsung's lawyers hit the nail on the head in their argument before the Supreme Court. Allowing the lower court rulings to stand would award the owner of a cup holder patent the entire profit from the sale of an 18-wheeler big rig truck just because it used the infringing cup holder design.
I can see an argument for awarding slightly more of the profit than is attributable to the single component (having the infringing feature allowed you to make sales which you wouldn't have made). But awarding all the profit is insane. If that's the standard you're going to use, then Apple should just hand over all their profit from their iPhones 1 through 4 to Samsung, because they infringed one of Samsung's FRAND patents. Apple escaped punishment for that only because Obama used executive privilege to nullify that ITC decision.
LCDs don't work like that. They work by orienting two polarizers. The first is a fixed polarizer, which cuts the backlight's brightness to 50% and polarizes the light. The second is a polarizing liquid crystal layer whose orientation can be controlled electronically. Orient it parallel to the fixed polarizer and all the light going through the fixed polarizer is let through. Orient it perpendicular and it blocks (in theory) all the light going through. (In practice the polarizing is not perfect, so there's a little leakage. Which is why black pixels are not entirely black on an LCD.
However, adding a third polarizer does not help. At best, the same amount of light is blocked as with two polarizers perpendicular to each other. At worst, it allows more light to go through than two polarizers.
Whatever extra layer they're using, it's not a polarizer, so it can't be an LCD. It's probably some sort of electrochromic glass whose reflectivity (and thus opacity) can be controlled electrically. And they've figured out a way to divide the effect into zones which coincide with the pixels or groupings of pixels on the LCD. It probably doesn't have as much fine granularity of partial opacity as an LCD does (else they could just use it instead of LCDs since LCDs always block at least 50% of the backlight), LCDs have gotten good enough to where we can use them to generate 1024 shades (10-bit, though most panels are still 8-bit or 6-bit), while last I heard electrochromic glass was binary.
If TFA is correct, then Samsung tried to put the largest battery possible while keeping the phone as thin as possible. If they wanted more profit, they could've gone with a smaller battery or a thicker design with larger tolerances. Both would've been cheaper for them to manufacture and thus would've increased their profit margin. But they eschewed that marginal profit and went the extra mile for the customer - packing in the largest battery possible while keeping the phone as small and thin as possible. Unfortunately they went too far, to the point where it compromised the safety of the device.
If I had to guess, they probably goofed because this was only their second gen all-metal design. They didn't have the experience to tell them how tight was too tight (at least not until now). They could pack the battery this tightly on their older plastic bodies without problems because battery expansion would just push the rear plastic shell up a little.
Yup. If knowing the outcome is what's important, then you only need to watch the last 5-10 seconds of the event; you can skip everything that comes before. Heck, you can skip watching it entirely and just catch the score on a sports news website.
OTOH if the parts before the end of the game have entertainment value, then it doesn't matter if you know the outcome in advance, and there's no need to watch it live. The only benefit of watching it live is that it's easier to find other people who haven't seen it that you can watch it with.
You're assuming his status and success is due to privilege, not due to ability and effort. You're making this assumption based on his race and gender, not his individual circumstances. That is the definition of racism and sexism. Exactly the same as assuming a black college student is there only due to affirmative action.
Nearly all my entire extended family immigrated into the U.S. in the 1970s and early 1980s. At the time, Korea was a backwater and afraid of all its wealthy citizens emigrating, so it passed a law that each emigrating family was only allowed to take roughly $1500 worth of money and valuables with them. So every one of our families (about a dozen) started in the U.S. with a net value of $1500 - no job, no house, no car, little or no English language capability, and no contacts among the privileged white "elite". I was only 4 when we moved here but I remember - we lived in a government low-income apartment, and scoured garage sales and the Salvation Army store for basics like dishes and cutlery. All my clothes as a child were from second-hand stores - nothing new.
Today, only one of these original families is lower class (the father refuses to get a job and is content to live off government assistance and the mother's meager income). Everyone else has managed to carve out middle class ($25k+/yr) or better lives, most in the top third ($65k+/yr). Three are upper class ($150k+/yr, or top 5%), the most successful of whom owns a multi-million dollar cell phone store chain they founded (a 1%er). Among our second generation (myself and about 30 cousins), one was middle class but is now in prison, one (child of the one lower class family) is lower class but just got his nursing degree and a job offer at a salary that would put him in the top third, one has mental health issues but falls into the middle class when he can hold a job. The rest of us are middle class or higher, with 6 being upper class ($150k+/yr).
This "privilege" you speak of either doesn't exist or has nowhere near the amount of influence on people's lives that you think it does. If you put in the time and effort, chances are that you can succeed regardless of your starting social and financial status. The only statistical deviation from the U.S. norm that jumps out in my family is that over half of us started our own business after we'd saved up some money, rather than were content to remain employees. I think that was due to not understanding pensions, Social Security, nor investing in stocks, so we sought the only other obvious way to assure an income in retirement. But it seems to have worked in our favor.
The "feature" has already caused at least one death.
Last week, a burglar pried apart some security bars at my business and squeezed in. He was able to make off with some stolen goods because once inside, he was easily able to open the locked exit door. Fire codes require that all building exit doors accessible to the public be openable from the inside even when locked. These laws were made after repeated fires with huge death tolls exacerbated by locked exit doors. That's what the bar on the door you press when leaving most restaurants and stores does. Even when the door is locked, pushing the bar from the inside will open the door. That way if a fire breaks out, you're not trapped inside because the only person who has the key was the idiot who started the fire and is dead.
Same thing with refrigerators - both the old stand-up units which latched shut, and walk-in refrigerator/freezers used in restaurants. Too many people (especially kids playing) were dying after being trapped inside, that laws were passed requiring a mechanism which allows someone inside to open the latch on the outside.
I don't see why cars should be any different. Yes easy egress makes thievery easier. But preventing that is just not worth the potential loss of life. Any car designer who thinks this is a good idea should be locked inside one of their cars on a sunny day until they admit it's a terrible idea. Heck, after dozens of kids dying each year after being locked in the trunk of a car while playing, we finally passed a law mandating a release mechanism inside the trunk. And some idiot car designer decides it would be a good idea to make it impossible for someone inside the passenger compartment to exit at will? Shame on BMW for trying to spin this to the press as a "helpful" feature.
Speaking as a former merchant, the billing address, security code, expiration date* aren't required to process a credit card transaction. They're tools the credit card companies give merchants to help prevent fraud (while simultaneously passing laws prohibiting merchants from requiring credit card users to show ID to prove it's actually their card**).
The way it works is that if you're a merchant and you accept a fraudulent/stolen card, the onus is on you to prove that to the best of your knowledge the transaction was legit. The main way this is done is by validating the signature on the receipt matches the signature the card company has on file. When you accept a card, you're supposed to check the signature on the back of the card to insure it matches the signature on the receipt. If the cardholder requests a chargeback and the signature doesn't match, it's instantly game over - the merchant loses and the card company grants the chargeback.
If it sorta matches or (for online purchases) there is no signature, then it falls onto these secondary security measures. The more data the merchant collected which correctly matches the info the card company has on file (security code, expiration date, billing address, phone number, cardholder's birthdate, I think that's all) the better the chances the merchant will win against a chargeback. So it's in the best interests of the merchant to collect as much info as possible to protect themsevles. But on the flip side if you try to collect too much info you make the transaction more annoying for the cardholder, and risk alienating them so they go make their purchase elsewhere. Or (for brick and mortar purchases) you slow down the checkout line forcing you to hire more cashiers and add more cash registers. So the merchant picks the amount of security they're comfortable with. I've always wondered what happens if someone sets up a fake merchant account, runs a bunch of fraudulent transactions without any security checks, then absconds with the money and closes the bank account once the credit card has wired the payments, before any of the cardholders can notice and request chargebacks.
There are some other ways to get fake credit card transaction to go through that I fell victim to about 10 years ago when I lost one of my cards. I promptly called to report the card lost/stolen and figured that was that. But reviewing my card statements, I noticed a fraudulent charge on the second statement after I'd gotten a new card with a new number. After some discussion with the card company, I learned that (1) as of 2007 they still allowed carbon copy credit card transactions. Older readers may recall the credit card machines used before phone and Internet credit card machines. They'd take your card, put it in the machine, put a carbon copy form on top of it, then run a roller over the card to imprint it onto the carbon copy paper. One copy became the customer's receipt, the other the merchants. The merchant would then mail these in for processing and to receive payment. Because of the time delay, the credit card companies would continue to process these even if they were received after the card had been canceled.
"But the date on the fraudulent transaction is after I reported my card lost/stolen. Why was it still processed?" I asked. (2) The thief had processed it as a subscription service. Apparently when people have a card stolen they frequently forget to update their magazine subscriptions with the new card info. The credit card companies got tired of getting into 3-way arguments about canceled subscriptions because the payment was denied due to the card being canceled. So if the transaction is coded as payment for a subscription, the card company will "helpfully" forward the charge to the new card even if the charge was processed using the account's old (stolen) card number.
* (I don't think expiration date is required, but this was a decade ago so I don't recall exactly.)
** (The card companie
Instead of bio-engineering an organism which collects sunlight and uses it to extract CO2 from the atmosphere, why don't we just plant more trees?
I understand that you're upset that we're not doing more about CO2 emissions. But you have to understand that we're directly in control of those CO2 emissions. If we wanted to, we could stop all our CO2 emissions tomorrow. The problem isn't the capability, it's the desire. We already have the capability, we just lack the desire.
Releasing a self-replicating bio-engineered organism which extracts CO2 from the atmosphere is an order of magnitude more reckless than wantonly emitting CO2 to generate energy. Because once you release a self-replicating organism, you no longer have any control over it. If it turns out our calculations and predictions are wrong about the effects of reducing our CO2 emissions, we can modify our behavior in response because we control our CO2 emissions. But once you release that organism, that's it. It's out of our control. If our calculations were wrong about what the steady state response of the ecosystem will be to the introduction of that organism, we won't be able to stop it even if we desire to do so.
At least with trees, you have an organism which has been around for millions of years so its steady state effect on the ecosystem is pretty well understood.