It turns out that where you extract taxes from is irrelevant. The economy all interconnected, and money flows like water running around a circular wheel. Taxes are just diverting some of that water (money) from this wheel to the government (who injects it back at different points in the wheel). Regardless of whether you extract water (taxes) at the point where individuals receive income (income tax), or at the point where individuals spend income (sales tax), or while a corporation is in possession of it (corporate tax), it has the same overall effect - the private sector (individuals, companies) can direct the flow of less water, the government can direct more.
So whether you're taxing via income taxes, sales taxes, or corporate taxes is irrelevant. They all do the same thing and have the same effect on the economy.
Higher income taxes results in lower individual spending and thus lower corporate profits.
Higher sales taxes causes lower individual spending, which leads to lower corporate profits and thus lower individual income in the form of lower wages and distributions..
Higher corporate taxes results in lower wages and distribution and thus lower individual spending.
They all have the same effect. All you're doing by selecting one tax over another is changing who gets stuck with the paperwork and actually sends the money to the government. The consequence of sending that money to the government is distributed over the entire economy (individual income, spending, and corporate profit) regardless of what stage the money is extracted
So rather than have a gazillion different taxes, the system can actually be optimized by eliminating all taxes except for one.* And if you believe in a progressive tax structure (people with higher income should pay a higher percentage in taxes), then the obvious tax you want to keep is the income tax.
*(Actually we probably also want to keep behavior-modifying taxes like cigarette taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, etc. Their primary goal is to modify people's behavior, not necessarily the revenue they generate.)
If you need a refresher on, say, Mohr's circle, you grab a textbook and look it up in the index. If you've got an e-textbook, you just do a search on Mohr's circle. But good luck quickly finding the 10 minute segment of video describing Mohr's circle from a library of hundreds of lecture videos on structural engineering.
The difference is that you can easily create an index of photos or text because they're not time-dependent. You can reduce them in size (photos) or context (keywords) by just reducing their spatial dimensions. An index generated this way lets you rapidly search a huge library. Time is irrelevant to the process.
On the other hand, audio (and consequently video) is time-dependent. If you try to reduce it, it becomes frequency-shifted until it's unrecognizable, or too rapid for you to understand. If you try to use reduce it to short clips (preserving the playback speed for the clips), then someone has to go through and manually pick out the segments of audio/video to turn into clips. It cannot be done automatically.
This is why you take notes in class. It converts the time-dependent lecture, into a time-independent text record which you can rapidly scan and search to remind yourself of material presented in the lecture.
You assume such a system will always work like it was originally intended. They rarely do. Bad people figure out ways to exploit existing systems to subvert their original intent. A system for expunging incorrect info gets re-tasked into a system for expunging contrary opinions.
That's why it's crucial to avoid building systems which can easily be subverted in this manner. The Internet is great for individual freedom because anyone can say anything they want on it. The moment you start putting up roadblocks on it, requiring people to pass some sort of test or get someone else's approval, before they're allowed to share what they're saying, you create a choke point for the flow of information to the people. He who controls that choke point controls what information the people see and hear..
The correct solution to the anti-vaccination movement isn't to censor and delete their speech as fake or non-truth. It's to educate people so that they're able to determine for themselves that it's flawed and incorrect. The former method creates a system which an potential dictator could subvert to manipulate and control the people (need I point out that Hitler started off being elected via a democratic election). The latter creates a society which is inherently resistant to the machinations of a wannabe-dictator.
People just want to go with censorship because it's a quick and easy fix (and some of the people advocating that approach are wannabe-dictators themselves). OTOH teaching kids to think logically and rationally is hard and takes decades. But the harder solution here is the one that's more robust and better for society long-term.
Manufacturers have to decide if they're selling a product (in which case they cede control over it the moment it's sold, including the power to thwart repairs), or licensing it (in which case they can continue to exert control over the product, but the product belongs to them rather than to the customer, and so the manufacturer has to pay for repairs). That is, either the customer owns the product they buy, and has a right to repair it. Or the customer is permanently leasing the product from the manufacturer, so the manufacturer needs to pay for any repairs, not the customer.
The in-between state - where the customer is responsible for paying to repair a product they've bought, but the manufacturer continues to exert control over a product after purchase - is illogical and nonsensical.
Force him to work in a bomb disposal squad, as the point man assigned to go out and collect the explosive device to put it into a steel container for transport. Once he's successfully collected and defused 2400 bombs, we can consider his debt to society repaid. And maybe by then he'll have a better inkling of the stress and anguish he caused with all his hoaxes.
and useful if a discrete GPU could begin to use system RAM as second-tier VRAM once the VRAM on board the GPU was exhausted. That would prevent the issue where if you run out of VRAM, the game starts to stutter as the game dumps textures from VRAM and is forced to read new textures in off disk. If those extra textures could be held in system RAM instead, the stutter when it was transferred to the GPU would be considerably smaller than having to read it off disk.
Nvidia and AMD would never do this because it would cannibalize their sales of GPUs with more VRAM. Right now if your GPU doesn't have enough VRAM to run a game, your only choices are to reduce texture quality, or buy a new GPU. Intel only did it because they built GPUs without any VRAM, or with just 32-64 MB of eDRAM.
The need has decreased as SSDs have supplanted HDDs. And some games appear to be doing this manually - caching all textures in system RAM so they don't need to be re-read from disk. But system RAM as second-tier VRAM would be faster and a more universal solution.
The exclusion zone is actually 2600 km^2, or 1000 mi^2. Someone at the BBC who has no business writing anything with numbers apparently read that as miles (not mi^2), and converted to 4184 km, which he rounded down to 4000 km^2.
A 30 km evacuation radius yields a 2827 km^2 circle. So pretty close to 2600 km^2.
The design of the plant at Chernobyl used a positive void coefficient. Basically, when the cooling water starts to boil (creating voids in the water), that increases the rate of nuclear fission. No western nuclear plant was ever designed like this because of how stupidly dangerous it is. All western nuclear plants use a negative void coefficient - the cooling water boiling slows down the rate of fission. An accident like Chernobyl could never happen at a western plant. The Soviets were trying to get energy for as cheap as possible and cut all sorts of corners designing their plants, including using a positive void coefficient .
Chernobyl began as a test where they intentionally shut down the automatic safety systems, then didn't react in time when the rate of fissioning began to go out of control. Due to the positive void coefficient design, once the boiling water began boiling, the heat generation began to increase exponentially. The fuel vaporized and exploded, blowing the reactor and containment building apart, and throwing radioactive debris and vapor into the atmosphere and countryside.
The accident at Three Mile Island was actually pretty similar in terms of buildup. They shut down a bunch of safety systems for a test, then didn't monitor the instrument readings closely enough (or more likely, the people monitoring them weren't trained well enough to understand what the readings meant - Homer Simpson as incompetent nuclear plant operator is actually a reference to TMI). The temperature went up, the cooling water boiled, and the fissioning stopped. The increased temperature was enough to melt the fuel rods, turning the reactor into useless slag. But it was all contained within the steel pressure vessel exactly like designed (there's a second reinforced concrete containment vessel around the pressure vessel in case it fails). The concern at the time was that a reaction between the fuel rod cladding and water had created hydrogen gas at sufficient pressure to crack both containment vessels, so they evacuated around the plant out of an abundance of \caution. But it turned out not to have been a concern as the hydrogen vented. It's a tiny molecule so can permeate through things that are designed to contain water and radioactive materials. (It's the reason the buildings at Fukushima blew apart. There's supposed to be a vent or fan which exhausts hydrogen into the atmosphere, but apparently that wasn't working at Fukushima so it built up until it reacted with atmospheric oxygen in an explosion that blew apart the exterior building. It did not affect the pressure vessel or the concrete containment vessel.)
The comparison I like to draw when people point to Chernobyl as an example of problems with nuclear power is Banqio. The worst power generation-related accident in history was actually the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. During intense rain, a series of earthen dams used to hold water for generation at a hydroelectric power plant failed. The resulting flood and devastation killed about 170,000 people, destroyed nearly 6 million buildings, and left 11 million people homeless. But no western country uses earthen dams for hydroelectric power. So citing Banqio as an example of why hydroelectric power is dangerous and shouldn't be used, is like citing Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear power is dangerous and shouldn't be used. They're both irrelevant outside of the Communist bloc, since the rest of the world never did anything so stupidly dangerous.
Yeah, I thought the implication that the "growth mindset" professors were right, and the "fixed mindset" professers were wrong was unwarranted. With the data they've given, you can't tell if the problem is the fixed mindset professors are grading non-white/asians low, or the growth mindset professors are grading non-white/asians high.
The most interesting result I saw wasn't mentioned in the summary and barely mentioned in TFA. The fixed mindset professors graded about 0.2 points lower than the growth mindset professors. -0.15 for whites/asians, -0.24 for non-white/asians compared to the growth mindset professors. That would seem to suggest it's the growth minded professors who are inflating grades (unless you want to advocate the theory that fixed minded professors are grading too hard - which would be counter to the general belief that schools grade too easy).
Unfortunately the paper is paywalled. I'd love to see the raw data.
Total amount of nuclear power generated since commercial nuclear power became widely available: about 86000 TWh
about 20 years ramping up from 0 to 2000 TWh/yr, plus 30 years at about 2200 TWh/yr = (20*2000/2) + (30*2200) = 86000
Cost of the above two cleanups divided by the amount of energy generated by nuclear power: $432 billion / 86000 billion kWh = $0.005 per kWh = 0.5 cents per kWh
I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?
The industry, points out AFL-CIO's secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler, boasted sales 3.6 times greater than those of the film industry in 2018, yet much of that financial success isn't felt by the developers working on the games that generate those billions.
So let's take a look at that. How has unionizing helped income equality in the film industry? Apparently not much, as two of the five companies with the worst CEO to median worker pay ratio are film studios, and a third is a TV studio.
If you look through that list, you get the sense that the presence of robust competition within the industry is the important factor, not unions. About a third of the companies on that list enjoy IP monopolies (copyrights, patents) or regulatory monopolies (ISPs). And several of the remainder have close to a natural monopoly.
No, Social security and SSI disability are paid by both the employee and the employer, and are not "Income Taxes".
1. The employer's share of payroll taxes are paid for by the employee, in the form of a lower wage. If the employer hired you knowing they'd be paying you a salary of $50,000/yr plus $3825/yr in their share of your payroll taxes, then they hired you knowing you would cost them $53,825/yr. So absent the payroll taxes, they would've hired you at a salary of $53,825/yr. Since you are receiving only $50,000/yr instead of $53,825/yr, you are paying the employer's share of payrolll taxes in the form of a lower wage.
2. While they are not technically "income taxes", any tax which reduces the disposable income available to the wage-earner functions identically to an income tax. This includes sales taxes and value added taxes (which decrease the purchasing power of your disposable income). This is pretty obvious once you realize that the entire point of taxation is to divert some of the country's productivity into the government's coffers so the government can decide how the money is spent instead of you. Since the only source of productivity is people (the productivity of a corporation is just the sum of the productivity of its employees), every tax functions the same as an income tax.
Surprisingly, this includes corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are assessed as a percentage of a corporation's profit. Corporate profit goes to shareholders as distributions. So a corporate tax functions the same as an income tax on those shareholder distributions. The only difference is that one tax sends the money to the government before it changes hands from the corporation to the shareholder, the other sends the money to the government after it changes hands.
Basically, the massive tax code we have is an enormous shell game to try to hide taxes from the people who are paying for it all - wage earners. It would be a whole lot easier, cheaper, and more transparent if we just combined all the taxes into one, single tax. And if you believe in a progressive tax code (higher incomes pay higher tax), then the obvious single tax to keep is the income tax. All other taxes could be eliminated in lieu of an income tax. (Though you'd probably want to keep behavior-modifying taxes, like fuel taxes, property taxes, cigarette taxes, etc.) This would have the additional benefit of eliminating corporate tax dodging, since that's only made possible because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions. People can only exist in one place at a time, so they can't dodge an income tax.
Also worth pointing out that the merchants are the ones forced to pay for fraud, not the credit card company. If a card company decides a transaction is fraudulent, they simply issue a chargeback against the merchant. The merchant loses the payment, and they're out the merchandise, so they're the ones paying for credit card fraud. Which manes the cost of fraud ends up silently included in the prices the merchant charges.
That's why the credit card companies have been so slow to adopt changes to combat fraud. It is not affecting them financially, so they have no incentive to improve security. They've also fostered the myth that the high interest rates are necessary to fight fraud. When in reality, the interest rates just pay for credit card holders who are delinquent on their payments.
While a cash discount can cancel out the average credit card transaction fee, it does not allow for distinction between different fees for different credit cards. So the problem OP pointed out remains - there is no incentive for customers to prefer cards with lower fees over others. That is arguably the reason why the ban is crafted with such an "obvious loophole." Because the loophole seems to make the ban ineffective, when in fact the purpose of the ban is to prohibit competition between different credit cards. Not between credit cards vs cash.
The bulk news outlets are Reuters, AP (Associated Press), and less frequently UPI (United Press International). They hire reporters to travel the world writing up stories, then sell the stories to smaller news services which cannot afford to send one of their own reporters overseas for every single international story. When properly attributed, their stories start with an (AP) or (Reuters) or (UPI) tag at the beginning of the text. When unattributed, they're easy to pick out since a google search of a snippet of text from the article will turn up lots of identical properly-attributed articles. I'm guessing you could then report the paper or news website to Reuters or AP or UPI for a copyright violation.
Four engines is less efficient per ton-mile than two. (Two engines are less efficient than one, but people seem to think having a redundant propulsion system is a good idea in an airliner.) This is true for planes, boats, cars (where 4WD uses slightly more fuel than 2WD). And the capacity of an A380 (575 in typical 3-class seating) is less than 60% more than a 777 (365 in its largest 3-class version), less than 50% more than an A350 (387 in largest 3-class version). Not twice as much.
The A380 doesn't haven a weight advantage either. It's MTOW is 1.268 million pounds, or 2205 lbs per passenger with 575 passengers. The 777 MTOW is 775,000 pounds, or 2123 lbs per passenger with 365 passengers with similar range. The A380's weight per passenger is often worse due to the increased difficulty of booking 575 passengers for a single flight. This was a complaint Boeing often received about the 747, which led it to develop the smaller 777 and 787.
Its fuel capacity (560,000 lbs) @ 575 passengers and 8000 nautical miles gives it a consumption of 0.122 pounds per passenger-mile. The 777-300ER (321,000 lbs fuel) @ 365 passengers and 7370 nmi has a fuel consumption of 0.119 pounds per passenger mile. So a fully loaded A380 actually burns slightly more fuel than a fully loaded 777-300ER. That means the only time it makes sense to use an A380 instead of a 777 is when you have more than 365 passengers wanting to fly a certain route (but fewer than 575), or when a route is between 7370 and 8000 nmi.
Also, part of the A380's problem is that there is practically zero demand for it in the second hand market (discount airlines and airlines in developing markets). That makes its acquisition cost higher for the airline initially purchasing it since they can't recoup as much of their initial investment when they retire the plane. Its primary customers remain the airlines catering to wealthy travelers (more than half the A380 orders are from Emirates).
Way back when the A380 was first announced, I pointed out over and over (and the Airbus fans kept modding me down) that Boeing had pitched the idea of a full-double deck 747 to the airlines ever since the 747 first entered service in the 1970s. Boeing never built it because there was never enough demand for it from the airlines. McDonnell Douglass pitched a similar plane back in the 1990s, and it too met with little interest from the airlines. It took the EU with its "government should decide what happens, not the market" philosophy to force Airbus to build a plane with insufficient market demand. (The cockpit of the 747 was placed on a second deck to allow for loading cargo through the nose in the freighter version. So using the second deck for more passengers was an unintended side-effect.)
At the same time, Boeing bet on smaller, more efficient twin-engine planes (the 777 and 787) servicing more direct routes, instead of the hub and spoke model championed by the A380 and 747. Boeing's market research appears to have been accurate, as that's what the airlines are buying (over 2000 orders for the 777, 1400 for the 787, nearly 900 for the A350). For two decades the 777 had the long-range 300+ passenger market all to itself. It completely demolished Airbus' offering (just 377 deliveries for the 4-engine A340). When Airbus introduced the A350 as a competitor to the 787, the airlines rebelled and Airbus was forced to redesign it to be bigger so it would compete with both the 787 and 777.
Original slashdot article and discussion. Guy hacked together a digital camera (they were relatively new back then) and an electromagnet controlling the door latch, and wrote his own image recognition software to block the cat from using the cat door if it had a "present" in its mouth. The cat would be allowed in if it was not carrying anything in its mouth. But it also happened to work at blocking other animals from entering through the door.
That people want to run stuff on their iPhones without having to get Apple's approval for it first?
I'll repeat. I think Google has the best model here. They run the Play Store for apps, and control what is/isn't allowed in that store. But if a user wants to run stuff installed outside the Play Store, they just need to change a single setting on their phone (which pops up a warning about what you are doing), and it'll allow them to install apps from other sources. It's up to the user to decide which apps they can/can't run.
Apple's model of forcing everyone to comply with their wishes is essentially a dictatorship. They decide what users can/can't do.
Just browse YouTube in Firefox in private mode. It has a built-in ad blocker. There's probably a way to enable the ad-blocker in regular browsing mode, but I usually browse in private mode all the time for the extra anonymity so haven't looked for it.
On a meta level, it's hypocritical for a government (a taxing institution) to give tax breaks to just one company. If New York has decided that its current level of taxation is the proper amount for optimal public services, then reducing that tax rate to attract a single company is hypocritical. Either you believe your rate of taxation is at the correct level and should stick with it. Or you realize your rate of taxation is too high and is driving away outside businesses, so you should lower it for everyone.
Bottom line, Amazon's pushing Supply Side (aka Trickle Down) economics on NY (pay us for the jobs and the money you give us will trickle down to workers). NY was smart enough not to buy it for a change. Here's hoping the rest of the country will tell Amazon to go pound sand and they'll have to pay for the services they want and need.
Amazon can ask for whatever they want. Ultimately it's up to the city to decide whether or not to grant it. If a government is principled, it will not offer special subsidies and incentives to any individual or lone company. If the government believes its taxation policies are right and proper, it will only offer subsidies and incentives to everyone, or to certain classes (e.g. if it wants to attract high-tech jobs). Not to individuals or lone companies.
While Amazon was slime for asking for tax breaks, fault for the deal ultimately lies with NYC for being unprincipled and granting it. It takes two to tango.
The median household income of New York City is $60,879. In particular, Queens is $64,509, and the Bronx is $37,397, and Brooklyn is $56,942 (these two neighbor Queens). Median income is the income of the 50th percentile household. So nearly half the people in this area live in NYC on less than $50k.
The idea that the 1% has all the power is a myth. The IRS tax stats are freely available for anyone to see and analyze. The 1% (everyone making approx $500k per year or more) only accounts for 19% of total income in the U.S. The vast majority of economic power in the U.S. (64% of all income) rests with those making $50k-$500k per year.
This is also why the fantasies about giving the 1% a 90% tax rate won't really accomplish much. The 1% simply doesn't make enough money. If you taxed them at 90% (which with certain state tax rates would be a 100% total tax rate), that would only bring in enough money to pay for about a third of the Federal budget. Paying for the Federal government at its current size requires a significant tax rate on those making $50k to $500k, and increasing Federal spending means the taxes on those people has to increase to pay for it.
That said, the ineptocracy happens because currently 61% of the adult population makes less than $50k, and 43% of adults make less than $30k. If you don't flatten income distribution so a majority of the population makes the majority of income, the majority of the population will simply vote to take via government programs what they're not being paid enough to buy on their own. And the end result will be an ineptocracy.
The first line of reasoning is that we shouldn't have anything to do with corrupt regimes, and in fact should boycott them. That's the approach we took with Cuba. The result being that Cuba has stayed Communist 60 years with its people still mired in an economic backwater with little knowledge of the free world. Cuba's GDP per capita barely budged for 50 years until Castro gave up power, and his successor began to implement reforms, eventually leading to thawing of relations with the U.S.
The second line of reasoning is that we need to have open trade and tourism with corrupt regimes, so that their citizens become more exposed to democratic ideals and culture. That's the approach we took with China. The result being that Chinese citizens have experienced a ten-fold increase in GDP per capita in the last 45 years since Nixon normalized relations with China. And Chinese citizens, while kept in the dark about certain embarrassing domestic events, are for the most part aware of how people in the free world live and frequently even travel there on vacations.
If you believe in Democracy, then you believe that power ultimately flows from the people. And the only way a corrupt government can truly be overthrown is via the will of the people being governed, not by the influence of an outside state. The most we as outsiders can do is try our best to empower those people. So from an ethical standpoint, the question becomes: Does it help the Chinese people more if we boycott China, or if we continue free trade with them? From a strictly economic standpoint, medieval monarchies were able to hold onto power by keeping the masses in poverty, and thus unable to afford to overthrow the nobility. Modern developed nations eventually reach a point (around $10k/yr GDP per capita) where further economic growth requires the development of an economic middle class. e.g. For the U.S., 58% of the income goes to people making $30k to $200k per year, 15% to people making $200k-$500k, and those making over $500k only account for 19% of all income. As a result, it's the people making $30k to $200k who wield the most power in the country.
So maintaining free trade with a corrupt regime means it must eventually empower its people if it wishes to continue economic growth. Whereas boycotting a corrupt regime means it can keep its people oppressed in perpetuity.
The backup for some of the VoIP servers I've seen at companies was actually an identical server with the exact same hardware. It would be kept up to date by restoring the backup of the operational server onto it. This served as both a backup in case of hardware failure, and a sanity check to confirm the software backups were working and restorable,
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that where you extract taxes from is irrelevant. The economy all interconnected, and money flows like water running around a circular wheel. Taxes are just diverting some of that water (money) from this wheel to the government (who injects it back at different points in the wheel). Regardless of whether you extract water (taxes) at the point where individuals receive income (income tax), or at the point where individuals spend income (sales tax), or while a corporation is in possession of it (corporate tax), it has the same overall effect - the private sector (individuals, companies) can direct the flow of less water, the government can direct more.
So whether you're taxing via income taxes, sales taxes, or corporate taxes is irrelevant. They all do the same thing and have the same effect on the economy.
They all have the same effect. All you're doing by selecting one tax over another is changing who gets stuck with the paperwork and actually sends the money to the government. The consequence of sending that money to the government is distributed over the entire economy (individual income, spending, and corporate profit) regardless of what stage the money is extracted
So rather than have a gazillion different taxes, the system can actually be optimized by eliminating all taxes except for one.* And if you believe in a progressive tax structure (people with higher income should pay a higher percentage in taxes), then the obvious tax you want to keep is the income tax.
*(Actually we probably also want to keep behavior-modifying taxes like cigarette taxes, fuel taxes, property taxes, etc. Their primary goal is to modify people's behavior, not necessarily the revenue they generate.)
If you need a refresher on, say, Mohr's circle, you grab a textbook and look it up in the index. If you've got an e-textbook, you just do a search on Mohr's circle. But good luck quickly finding the 10 minute segment of video describing Mohr's circle from a library of hundreds of lecture videos on structural engineering.
The difference is that you can easily create an index of photos or text because they're not time-dependent. You can reduce them in size (photos) or context (keywords) by just reducing their spatial dimensions. An index generated this way lets you rapidly search a huge library. Time is irrelevant to the process.
On the other hand, audio (and consequently video) is time-dependent. If you try to reduce it, it becomes frequency-shifted until it's unrecognizable, or too rapid for you to understand. If you try to use reduce it to short clips (preserving the playback speed for the clips), then someone has to go through and manually pick out the segments of audio/video to turn into clips. It cannot be done automatically.
This is why you take notes in class. It converts the time-dependent lecture, into a time-independent text record which you can rapidly scan and search to remind yourself of material presented in the lecture.
You assume such a system will always work like it was originally intended. They rarely do. Bad people figure out ways to exploit existing systems to subvert their original intent. A system for expunging incorrect info gets re-tasked into a system for expunging contrary opinions.
That's why it's crucial to avoid building systems which can easily be subverted in this manner. The Internet is great for individual freedom because anyone can say anything they want on it. The moment you start putting up roadblocks on it, requiring people to pass some sort of test or get someone else's approval, before they're allowed to share what they're saying, you create a choke point for the flow of information to the people. He who controls that choke point controls what information the people see and hear..
The correct solution to the anti-vaccination movement isn't to censor and delete their speech as fake or non-truth. It's to educate people so that they're able to determine for themselves that it's flawed and incorrect. The former method creates a system which an potential dictator could subvert to manipulate and control the people (need I point out that Hitler started off being elected via a democratic election). The latter creates a society which is inherently resistant to the machinations of a wannabe-dictator.
People just want to go with censorship because it's a quick and easy fix (and some of the people advocating that approach are wannabe-dictators themselves). OTOH teaching kids to think logically and rationally is hard and takes decades. But the harder solution here is the one that's more robust and better for society long-term.
Manufacturers have to decide if they're selling a product (in which case they cede control over it the moment it's sold, including the power to thwart repairs), or licensing it (in which case they can continue to exert control over the product, but the product belongs to them rather than to the customer, and so the manufacturer has to pay for repairs). That is, either the customer owns the product they buy, and has a right to repair it. Or the customer is permanently leasing the product from the manufacturer, so the manufacturer needs to pay for any repairs, not the customer.
The in-between state - where the customer is responsible for paying to repair a product they've bought, but the manufacturer continues to exert control over a product after purchase - is illogical and nonsensical.
Force him to work in a bomb disposal squad, as the point man assigned to go out and collect the explosive device to put it into a steel container for transport. Once he's successfully collected and defused 2400 bombs, we can consider his debt to society repaid. And maybe by then he'll have a better inkling of the stress and anguish he caused with all his hoaxes.
and useful if a discrete GPU could begin to use system RAM as second-tier VRAM once the VRAM on board the GPU was exhausted. That would prevent the issue where if you run out of VRAM, the game starts to stutter as the game dumps textures from VRAM and is forced to read new textures in off disk. If those extra textures could be held in system RAM instead, the stutter when it was transferred to the GPU would be considerably smaller than having to read it off disk.
Nvidia and AMD would never do this because it would cannibalize their sales of GPUs with more VRAM. Right now if your GPU doesn't have enough VRAM to run a game, your only choices are to reduce texture quality, or buy a new GPU. Intel only did it because they built GPUs without any VRAM, or with just 32-64 MB of eDRAM.
The need has decreased as SSDs have supplanted HDDs. And some games appear to be doing this manually - caching all textures in system RAM so they don't need to be re-read from disk. But system RAM as second-tier VRAM would be faster and a more universal solution.
The exclusion zone is actually 2600 km^2, or 1000 mi^2. Someone at the BBC who has no business writing anything with numbers apparently read that as miles (not mi^2), and converted to 4184 km, which he rounded down to 4000 km^2.
A 30 km evacuation radius yields a 2827 km^2 circle. So pretty close to 2600 km^2.
The design of the plant at Chernobyl used a positive void coefficient. Basically, when the cooling water starts to boil (creating voids in the water), that increases the rate of nuclear fission. No western nuclear plant was ever designed like this because of how stupidly dangerous it is. All western nuclear plants use a negative void coefficient - the cooling water boiling slows down the rate of fission. An accident like Chernobyl could never happen at a western plant. The Soviets were trying to get energy for as cheap as possible and cut all sorts of corners designing their plants, including using a positive void coefficient .
Chernobyl began as a test where they intentionally shut down the automatic safety systems, then didn't react in time when the rate of fissioning began to go out of control. Due to the positive void coefficient design, once the boiling water began boiling, the heat generation began to increase exponentially. The fuel vaporized and exploded, blowing the reactor and containment building apart, and throwing radioactive debris and vapor into the atmosphere and countryside.
The accident at Three Mile Island was actually pretty similar in terms of buildup. They shut down a bunch of safety systems for a test, then didn't monitor the instrument readings closely enough (or more likely, the people monitoring them weren't trained well enough to understand what the readings meant - Homer Simpson as incompetent nuclear plant operator is actually a reference to TMI). The temperature went up, the cooling water boiled, and the fissioning stopped. The increased temperature was enough to melt the fuel rods, turning the reactor into useless slag. But it was all contained within the steel pressure vessel exactly like designed (there's a second reinforced concrete containment vessel around the pressure vessel in case it fails). The concern at the time was that a reaction between the fuel rod cladding and water had created hydrogen gas at sufficient pressure to crack both containment vessels, so they evacuated around the plant out of an abundance of \caution. But it turned out not to have been a concern as the hydrogen vented. It's a tiny molecule so can permeate through things that are designed to contain water and radioactive materials. (It's the reason the buildings at Fukushima blew apart. There's supposed to be a vent or fan which exhausts hydrogen into the atmosphere, but apparently that wasn't working at Fukushima so it built up until it reacted with atmospheric oxygen in an explosion that blew apart the exterior building. It did not affect the pressure vessel or the concrete containment vessel.)
The comparison I like to draw when people point to Chernobyl as an example of problems with nuclear power is Banqio. The worst power generation-related accident in history was actually the failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. During intense rain, a series of earthen dams used to hold water for generation at a hydroelectric power plant failed. The resulting flood and devastation killed about 170,000 people, destroyed nearly 6 million buildings, and left 11 million people homeless. But no western country uses earthen dams for hydroelectric power. So citing Banqio as an example of why hydroelectric power is dangerous and shouldn't be used, is like citing Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear power is dangerous and shouldn't be used. They're both irrelevant outside of the Communist bloc, since the rest of the world never did anything so stupidly dangerous.
Yeah, I thought the implication that the "growth mindset" professors were right, and the "fixed mindset" professers were wrong was unwarranted. With the data they've given, you can't tell if the problem is the fixed mindset professors are grading non-white/asians low, or the growth mindset professors are grading non-white/asians high.
The most interesting result I saw wasn't mentioned in the summary and barely mentioned in TFA. The fixed mindset professors graded about 0.2 points lower than the growth mindset professors. -0.15 for whites/asians, -0.24 for non-white/asians compared to the growth mindset professors. That would seem to suggest it's the growth minded professors who are inflating grades (unless you want to advocate the theory that fixed minded professors are grading too hard - which would be counter to the general belief that schools grade too easy).
Unfortunately the paper is paywalled. I'd love to see the raw data.
about 20 years ramping up from 0 to 2000 TWh/yr, plus 30 years at about 2200 TWh/yr = (20*2000/2) + (30*2200) = 86000
Cost of the above two cleanups divided by the amount of energy generated by nuclear power: $432 billion / 86000 billion kWh = $0.005 per kWh = 0.5 cents per kWh
I can live with paying an extra half cent per kWh to cover cleaning up after the occasional disaster every 25 years, in exchange for using a completely carbon-neutral power source which boasts the fewest deaths per amount of power generated. Why exactly are you opposed to it?
So let's take a look at that. How has unionizing helped income equality in the film industry? Apparently not much, as two of the five companies with the worst CEO to median worker pay ratio are film studios, and a third is a TV studio.
If you look through that list, you get the sense that the presence of robust competition within the industry is the important factor, not unions. About a third of the companies on that list enjoy IP monopolies (copyrights, patents) or regulatory monopolies (ISPs). And several of the remainder have close to a natural monopoly.
1. The employer's share of payroll taxes are paid for by the employee, in the form of a lower wage. If the employer hired you knowing they'd be paying you a salary of $50,000/yr plus $3825/yr in their share of your payroll taxes, then they hired you knowing you would cost them $53,825/yr. So absent the payroll taxes, they would've hired you at a salary of $53,825/yr. Since you are receiving only $50,000/yr instead of $53,825/yr, you are paying the employer's share of payrolll taxes in the form of a lower wage.
2. While they are not technically "income taxes", any tax which reduces the disposable income available to the wage-earner functions identically to an income tax. This includes sales taxes and value added taxes (which decrease the purchasing power of your disposable income). This is pretty obvious once you realize that the entire point of taxation is to divert some of the country's productivity into the government's coffers so the government can decide how the money is spent instead of you. Since the only source of productivity is people (the productivity of a corporation is just the sum of the productivity of its employees), every tax functions the same as an income tax.
Surprisingly, this includes corporate taxes. Corporate taxes are assessed as a percentage of a corporation's profit. Corporate profit goes to shareholders as distributions. So a corporate tax functions the same as an income tax on those shareholder distributions. The only difference is that one tax sends the money to the government before it changes hands from the corporation to the shareholder, the other sends the money to the government after it changes hands.
Basically, the massive tax code we have is an enormous shell game to try to hide taxes from the people who are paying for it all - wage earners. It would be a whole lot easier, cheaper, and more transparent if we just combined all the taxes into one, single tax. And if you believe in a progressive tax code (higher incomes pay higher tax), then the obvious single tax to keep is the income tax. All other taxes could be eliminated in lieu of an income tax. (Though you'd probably want to keep behavior-modifying taxes, like fuel taxes, property taxes, cigarette taxes, etc.) This would have the additional benefit of eliminating corporate tax dodging, since that's only made possible because corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions. People can only exist in one place at a time, so they can't dodge an income tax.
Also worth pointing out that the merchants are the ones forced to pay for fraud, not the credit card company. If a card company decides a transaction is fraudulent, they simply issue a chargeback against the merchant. The merchant loses the payment, and they're out the merchandise, so they're the ones paying for credit card fraud. Which manes the cost of fraud ends up silently included in the prices the merchant charges.
That's why the credit card companies have been so slow to adopt changes to combat fraud. It is not affecting them financially, so they have no incentive to improve security. They've also fostered the myth that the high interest rates are necessary to fight fraud. When in reality, the interest rates just pay for credit card holders who are delinquent on their payments.
While a cash discount can cancel out the average credit card transaction fee, it does not allow for distinction between different fees for different credit cards. So the problem OP pointed out remains - there is no incentive for customers to prefer cards with lower fees over others. That is arguably the reason why the ban is crafted with such an "obvious loophole." Because the loophole seems to make the ban ineffective, when in fact the purpose of the ban is to prohibit competition between different credit cards. Not between credit cards vs cash.
The bulk news outlets are Reuters, AP (Associated Press), and less frequently UPI (United Press International). They hire reporters to travel the world writing up stories, then sell the stories to smaller news services which cannot afford to send one of their own reporters overseas for every single international story. When properly attributed, their stories start with an (AP) or (Reuters) or (UPI) tag at the beginning of the text. When unattributed, they're easy to pick out since a google search of a snippet of text from the article will turn up lots of identical properly-attributed articles. I'm guessing you could then report the paper or news website to Reuters or AP or UPI for a copyright violation.
Four engines is less efficient per ton-mile than two. (Two engines are less efficient than one, but people seem to think having a redundant propulsion system is a good idea in an airliner.) This is true for planes, boats, cars (where 4WD uses slightly more fuel than 2WD). And the capacity of an A380 (575 in typical 3-class seating) is less than 60% more than a 777 (365 in its largest 3-class version), less than 50% more than an A350 (387 in largest 3-class version). Not twice as much.
The A380 doesn't haven a weight advantage either. It's MTOW is 1.268 million pounds, or 2205 lbs per passenger with 575 passengers. The 777 MTOW is 775,000 pounds, or 2123 lbs per passenger with 365 passengers with similar range. The A380's weight per passenger is often worse due to the increased difficulty of booking 575 passengers for a single flight. This was a complaint Boeing often received about the 747, which led it to develop the smaller 777 and 787.
Its fuel capacity (560,000 lbs) @ 575 passengers and 8000 nautical miles gives it a consumption of 0.122 pounds per passenger-mile. The 777-300ER (321,000 lbs fuel) @ 365 passengers and 7370 nmi has a fuel consumption of 0.119 pounds per passenger mile. So a fully loaded A380 actually burns slightly more fuel than a fully loaded 777-300ER. That means the only time it makes sense to use an A380 instead of a 777 is when you have more than 365 passengers wanting to fly a certain route (but fewer than 575), or when a route is between 7370 and 8000 nmi.
Also, part of the A380's problem is that there is practically zero demand for it in the second hand market (discount airlines and airlines in developing markets). That makes its acquisition cost higher for the airline initially purchasing it since they can't recoup as much of their initial investment when they retire the plane. Its primary customers remain the airlines catering to wealthy travelers (more than half the A380 orders are from Emirates).
Way back when the A380 was first announced, I pointed out over and over (and the Airbus fans kept modding me down) that Boeing had pitched the idea of a full-double deck 747 to the airlines ever since the 747 first entered service in the 1970s. Boeing never built it because there was never enough demand for it from the airlines. McDonnell Douglass pitched a similar plane back in the 1990s, and it too met with little interest from the airlines. It took the EU with its "government should decide what happens, not the market" philosophy to force Airbus to build a plane with insufficient market demand. (The cockpit of the 747 was placed on a second deck to allow for loading cargo through the nose in the freighter version. So using the second deck for more passengers was an unintended side-effect.)
At the same time, Boeing bet on smaller, more efficient twin-engine planes (the 777 and 787) servicing more direct routes, instead of the hub and spoke model championed by the A380 and 747. Boeing's market research appears to have been accurate, as that's what the airlines are buying (over 2000 orders for the 777, 1400 for the 787, nearly 900 for the A350). For two decades the 777 had the long-range 300+ passenger market all to itself. It completely demolished Airbus' offering (just 377 deliveries for the 4-engine A340). When Airbus introduced the A350 as a competitor to the 787, the airlines rebelled and Airbus was forced to redesign it to be bigger so it would compete with both the 787 and 777.
Original slashdot article and discussion. Guy hacked together a digital camera (they were relatively new back then) and an electromagnet controlling the door latch, and wrote his own image recognition software to block the cat from using the cat door if it had a "present" in its mouth. The cat would be allowed in if it was not carrying anything in its mouth. But it also happened to work at blocking other animals from entering through the door.
Archive.org link to original TFA since the hosting site has apparently expunged it.
On a side note, why do homeless cats need to be protected in winter but not homeless dogs?
That people want to run stuff on their iPhones without having to get Apple's approval for it first?
I'll repeat. I think Google has the best model here. They run the Play Store for apps, and control what is/isn't allowed in that store. But if a user wants to run stuff installed outside the Play Store, they just need to change a single setting on their phone (which pops up a warning about what you are doing), and it'll allow them to install apps from other sources. It's up to the user to decide which apps they can/can't run.
Apple's model of forcing everyone to comply with their wishes is essentially a dictatorship. They decide what users can/can't do.
Just browse YouTube in Firefox in private mode. It has a built-in ad blocker. There's probably a way to enable the ad-blocker in regular browsing mode, but I usually browse in private mode all the time for the extra anonymity so haven't looked for it.
Amazon can ask for whatever they want. Ultimately it's up to the city to decide whether or not to grant it. If a government is principled, it will not offer special subsidies and incentives to any individual or lone company. If the government believes its taxation policies are right and proper, it will only offer subsidies and incentives to everyone, or to certain classes (e.g. if it wants to attract high-tech jobs). Not to individuals or lone companies.
While Amazon was slime for asking for tax breaks, fault for the deal ultimately lies with NYC for being unprincipled and granting it. It takes two to tango.
The median household income of New York City is $60,879. In particular, Queens is $64,509, and the Bronx is $37,397, and Brooklyn is $56,942 (these two neighbor Queens). Median income is the income of the 50th percentile household. So nearly half the people in this area live in NYC on less than $50k.
The idea that the 1% has all the power is a myth. The IRS tax stats are freely available for anyone to see and analyze. The 1% (everyone making approx $500k per year or more) only accounts for 19% of total income in the U.S. The vast majority of economic power in the U.S. (64% of all income) rests with those making $50k-$500k per year.
This is also why the fantasies about giving the 1% a 90% tax rate won't really accomplish much. The 1% simply doesn't make enough money. If you taxed them at 90% (which with certain state tax rates would be a 100% total tax rate), that would only bring in enough money to pay for about a third of the Federal budget. Paying for the Federal government at its current size requires a significant tax rate on those making $50k to $500k, and increasing Federal spending means the taxes on those people has to increase to pay for it.
That said, the ineptocracy happens because currently 61% of the adult population makes less than $50k, and 43% of adults make less than $30k. If you don't flatten income distribution so a majority of the population makes the majority of income, the majority of the population will simply vote to take via government programs what they're not being paid enough to buy on their own. And the end result will be an ineptocracy.
The first line of reasoning is that we shouldn't have anything to do with corrupt regimes, and in fact should boycott them. That's the approach we took with Cuba. The result being that Cuba has stayed Communist 60 years with its people still mired in an economic backwater with little knowledge of the free world. Cuba's GDP per capita barely budged for 50 years until Castro gave up power, and his successor began to implement reforms, eventually leading to thawing of relations with the U.S.
The second line of reasoning is that we need to have open trade and tourism with corrupt regimes, so that their citizens become more exposed to democratic ideals and culture. That's the approach we took with China. The result being that Chinese citizens have experienced a ten-fold increase in GDP per capita in the last 45 years since Nixon normalized relations with China. And Chinese citizens, while kept in the dark about certain embarrassing domestic events, are for the most part aware of how people in the free world live and frequently even travel there on vacations.
If you believe in Democracy, then you believe that power ultimately flows from the people. And the only way a corrupt government can truly be overthrown is via the will of the people being governed, not by the influence of an outside state. The most we as outsiders can do is try our best to empower those people. So from an ethical standpoint, the question becomes: Does it help the Chinese people more if we boycott China, or if we continue free trade with them? From a strictly economic standpoint, medieval monarchies were able to hold onto power by keeping the masses in poverty, and thus unable to afford to overthrow the nobility. Modern developed nations eventually reach a point (around $10k/yr GDP per capita) where further economic growth requires the development of an economic middle class. e.g. For the U.S., 58% of the income goes to people making $30k to $200k per year, 15% to people making $200k-$500k, and those making over $500k only account for 19% of all income. As a result, it's the people making $30k to $200k who wield the most power in the country.
So maintaining free trade with a corrupt regime means it must eventually empower its people if it wishes to continue economic growth. Whereas boycotting a corrupt regime means it can keep its people oppressed in perpetuity.
The backup for some of the VoIP servers I've seen at companies was actually an identical server with the exact same hardware. It would be kept up to date by restoring the backup of the operational server onto it. This served as both a backup in case of hardware failure, and a sanity check to confirm the software backups were working and restorable,
China has a bunch of unemployed farmers it can pay $10 a day to work on construction projects. California's minimum wage is $11 per hour.