The airlines are presumably hoping for some sort of regulatory capture to distort the market
It's not regulatory capture which distorts the market. It's a quasi-monopoly. The places I've seen this behavior (missing a leg of a flight) benefit passengers most is at airports where one airline dominates - a hub. Back when Northwest was still around, Detroit was one of their hubs. Something like 80% of all the flights in and out of Detroit were Northwest. That reduced competition meant that Northwest had undue influence over the pricing for tickets in and out of Detroit. They exploited that to charge excessively high prices for tickets starting and ending in Detroit.
But because Detroit was their hub, that meant a ton of flights between other cities made stopovers in Detroit to change planes. The other cities had plenty of competition so their fares were priced a lot closer to the airline's cost. That's what creates the opportunity for people to book flights between different cities at a lower price, and get off at Detroit (missing the last leg). So it's not strictly arbitrage per se, it's just bypassing the airline's quasi-monopoly pricing at a particular airport. (Higher pricing at airports with competition are usually due to fees charged by the different airports. e.g. Flights to/from Los Angeles International are cheaper than to/from Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or Orange County because the same agency operates all those airports but charges the lowest fees for LAX.)
I used a similar tactic to visit my sister for free when she was at the University of Michigan, and I was in Boston. Whenever I flew home to visit my parents in California, I'd book a flight with a layover in Detroit, and deliberately maximize the layover time (which gave me about 4 hours there). My sister would meet me at the airport, we'd go out and have a meal together and talk and catch up, and I'd take any presents she wanted me to bring my parents.
Airlines do everything in their power to cheat the customer. Just look at the overbooking practices.
Customers have almost no recourse.
Overbooking is not cheating the customer. Overbooking is a cost-cutting measure. That is, its purpose benefits the customer.
The cost of a flight to an airline is fixed. The average cost of a flight per passenger is thus minimized when the airline can maximize the number of people aboard each flight. How do you maximize the number of passengers per flight when (1) you have no guarantee how many seats will be sold each time (i.e. the number of people wanting to fly varies randomly each flight), and (2) some people buy refundable tickets and may change flights at the last minute? That is, the number of passengers who will actually fly varies.
If you disallow overbooking, you're saying the maximum of that range of variability can never exceed the number of seats on the plane. And thus the average number of passengers aboard the flight will be x fewer than the number of seats.
If you allow overbooking, you're saying the maximum of that range of variability can occasionally exceed the number of seats on the plane. And thus the average number of passengers aboard the flight will be closer to the number of seats. More passengers on average per flight means the airline can charge a lower price per seat and still make a profit.
It's like preparing snacks for a party where you're asking attendees to pay a $5 cover fee to pay for the snacks. If you send out 100 invites and prepare enough snacks for 100 guests, your average party expenses per guest will be higher because not everyone who's invited will always show up. But if you only prepare enough snacks for 90 guests, then your average party expenses per guest will be lower. It just introduces the additional risk of running out of snacks if more than 90 people happen to show up (you've overbooked). If people were willing to pay extra, then you could just buy enough snacks for 100 people all the time. But people have historically demonstrated that minimizing the amount they pay is the #1 priority for most people. So allowing overbooking is what allows you to give those people what they want most - a lower price.
This whole video game violence nonsense is a fundamental misunderstanding of correlation vs causation. Playing violent video games is correlated with increased violence in real life, so the people against video games jump to the conclusion that video games cause real life violence.
In reality, there are two other possible modes of causation. And those two are probably more likely to be the correct ones.
People who are violent in real life are drawn to playing violent video games.
People with a predilection for psychopathic behavior are both violent in real life and like to play violent video games.
He already paid U.S. taxes on all the money when he earned it in the U.S. And there's no Canadian law requiring you to pay any Canadian taxes on money you bring into the country.
Unstated: also wanted to avoid Canadian taxes on said money....
Canada taxes based on where you live. He was a Canadian citizen living in the U.S., so not subject to Canadian taxes on the money he earned while living in the U.S. I have several Canadian friends who work in the U.S. They have to be careful to monitor the time they spend visiting Canada on vacations and such. If they began (or ended) work in the U.S. partway through the year, and their visits to Canada push them over 183 days in Canada for the year, suddenly they are a Canadian resident for the year and owe Canadian taxes on everything they made. The U.S. taxes the money anyway since it was earned in the U.S.
I went through the reverse situation (U.S. citizen working in Canada). The U.S. taxes not just based on where you earned the money, but also on citizenship. So I was subject to double-taxation. Canada taxed my income because my job was in Canada. The U.S. taxed my income because I was a U.S. citizen. The two countries have a tax treaty so I only paid the greater of the two income taxes on my wages. But the treaty only covered earned income (you can apply your Canadian earned income tax bill as a credit to your U.S. earned income tax bill). If I had lived in Canada, any unearned income - interest from a savings account, investments, sales of stock which had appreciated, etc - would've been subject to double taxation. Both countries would've made me pay taxes on it. So I ended up living just across the border in the U.S. and commuted to work in Canada, and telecommuted often enough so I never passed 183 days per year in Canada.
California was another small nightmare. California taxes based on citizenship as well, and will still try to claim you are a California citizen (resident) even if you move to another country, and will try to make you pay California taxes on everything you make abroad. To thwart them, you first have to set up residency in another state before you move abroad. Preferably a state with no income taxes so they don't try to pull the same thing. So even if I had decided to live in Canada, I would've first had to have lived in Washington state long enough to get a driver's license there to officially shed my California residency.
The fees actually aren't your biggest concern. Exchange rates are always fluctuating. When I moved most of my Canadian funds back to the U.S., I did it a little at a time over a span of a couple months. If I had transferred it all at once, I could've lost a lot of money to a transient blip in the exchange rate. That happened to the owner of the company I was working at. He panicked when the U.S. Dollar began falling in Sept-Oct 2007 and converted all of the company's U.S. funds to Canadian in early November 2007. That happened to be
You're improperly comparing to a zero base state - post-surgery death vs if the person were living a normal life and didn't need surgery. That leads you to the incorrect conclusion that "something is wrong" when someone dies after surgery.
The correct comparison is is against what would've happened to the person if they hadn't gone into surgery. Except for cosmetic surgery, going to the OR is usually to treat a life-threatening problem. 4.2 million deaths after surgery vs 313 million surgical procedures is a 1.3% chance of death post-surgery. People opt for surgery because that's a helluva improvement over the ~50% chance of death if they hadn't gone into surgery.
The same miguided argument is used against vaccines. A few dozen children die from vaccines each year. Anti-vaxxers (comparing to a zero base state of no deaths) cite that as evidence that vaccines are unsafe. But the correct comparison is a few dozen deaths from vaccines, vs the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths if nobody were vaccinated. We opt for vaccines and surgery because they're the lesser of two evils (far, far lesser).
Another example is the crash of United Airlines 232. One of the passengers was a lap child - an infant or small child carried on the parents' lap and traveling without paying for a seat. The head stewardess abroad the flight followed procedure and instructed the parents to put the lap child underneath the seat in front of them like carry-on luggage. When the child died, she was so racked with guilt that she went on a multi-decade crusade to get lap children banned. The FAA finally ruled against her a few years ago. She was incorrectly comparing against a zero base state - the lap child dying vs possibly surviving if it had been belted into a seat. The FAA made the correct comparison. Lap children are allowed because flying is two orders of magnitude safer than driving. If you forced all parents with small children to pay for a seat for those children, a lot of them would opt to drive instead of fly. And as a result a lot more children would die from car accidents than this one lap child on this one ill-fated flight.
Instead of being frustrated over not knowing why the "unnecessary" death occurred, treat it as a gamble. The patient's original status gave him, say, a 50% chance of survival. Surgery gives him a 98.7% chance of survival. So surgery is obviously the better bet and wiser choice. But 1.3% of the time you will still lose that bet. It still boils down to the luck of the draw, except with surgery (and vaccines and lap children) you are stacking the deck far, far in your favor.
We can and certainly should try to improve the 1.3% fatality rate following surgery. But 1.3% is still a good thing, not something to be ashamed or fearful of. People are making jokes because TFA is naively trying to spin this story as if surgery were an additional risk, when it's actually a reduction in risk.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the fact that someone at this relatively small school knew how to take over an iPhone locked with a 6 digit passcode. It appears that gmail was the weak link here.
My guess would be the 6 digit passcode was the weak link. It's pretty easy to watch someone entering it, especially in a crowded place like a school. Once they're in, if the phone has gmail loaded, they can access the gmail account without knowing the password.
Gmail normally prevents someone from changing the gmail password without knowing the old password. But if you've got the phone set up as their pseudo-2FA, then a password reset request will just send a one-time code as a text message to the phone, making it trivial for the phone thief to change the gmail password. For real 2FA, use Authy. Not Google's Authenticator - it becomes compromised the moment the device you've installed it on is compromised. Authy requires you to enter an extra PIN or password every time you use it.
The lesson I have learned here (in any case, since the first step that occurred was his Google account password was changed and logged into from a different phone) is NEVER use gmail addresses for your Apple ID
Wouldn't have mattered. If the gmail address was the email on record for the Apple ID account, it was compromised the moment the gmail account was compromised. So the same thing would've happened regardless of what email service he was using. If you're really paranoid I suppose you could set up a separate gmail account to handle accounts and password resets, and not login to that unless needed. But I've found that that just results in you missing critical messages about an account expiring or changes being made to it.
The best protection is to solidify the security on whatever email account you're using (be it gmail, hotmail, yahoo, whatever). Enable real 2FA on it (not the fake "well send you a text or an email" 2FA), and use Authy instead of Authenticator. Gmail in particular gives you the option to create a half dozen one-time-use codes to bypass real 2FA. Generate them, print them, lock them in a safe deposit box. Use Authy from that point on. If something should happen to Authy (it shouldn't since your credentials are stored encrypted on their servers), you can get a bypass code from your safe deposit box and use that.
For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)
Try Philip Greenspun's website for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.
I wonder how many of these people were protected by helicopter parents from ever touching a hot stove, or having hot water from the bathtub spigot splash onto them. These aren't bad experiences we need to be protected from. We need to experience them in situations where the potential harm is small, so we can learn. That way, later in life we do not intentionally create stupid situations where where their potential harm is much greater.
I just had someone argue that a candle could heat an entire room in case of emergency, you just had to put it on fire bricks and a flower pot, the bricks would heat up (somehow) and give off heat.
A single candle won't. But a candle gives off about 50-100 Watts of thermal energy. It's actually close to the thermal output of a human body at rest (about 80-100 Watts). So if the overriding survival concern was temperature (instead of, say, pollutants in the air), then yes, one or two candles will put out as much heat as having another person in the room. And two or three dozen candles will put out as much heat as a 1500W space heater.
People just think candles are weak because they are spectacularly inefficient as a light source. IIRC only 0.04% of the energy goes into light; the rest is given off as heat. So that Earth Day tradition where businesses turn off their 12% efficient T8 fluorescent ceiling lights and use candles instead actually wastes a phenomenal amount of energy. A single T8 bulb consumes 32 Watts, or about as much as those small tea candles. But puts out a helluva lot more light.
Just build up a database of which videos I've viewed, which ones I've liked, and which ones I've disliked and generate a preference profile on me. Do this for everyone and generate preference profiles for every account. Find people with a similar preference profile as me and recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to like. Don't recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to dislike. People with a substantially different preference profile should have no effect on what's recommended to me.
Do this for every account, and the only thing a dislike-bombing campaign does is change which videos are recommended to people likely to participate in that particular dislike-bombing campaign. Which presumably is what they want since their profile says they're likely to participate in that campaign. That is, if your video preference profile is similar to those of people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the video will not be recommended to you (though you probably never would have watched it anyway if it hadn't been for the dislike-bombing campaign). If your preference profile is different from those people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the campaign will have zero effect on whether or not the video is recommended to you.
Netflix does this. The list of recommended movies you see is based on how closely that movie matches with other movies you've seen (based on the movie-watching history of other Netflix customers).
Although it's harder to see why today than it was in the past. Long, long ago, YouTube allowed you to see a like vs viewed ratio. That's the value that's really important - what percentage of people who viewed a video liked it? I dunno why YouTube removed it, but presumably it's still used in their internal "recommended for you" algorithm. Otherwise new videos would never be recommended because they always have fewer likes than older liked videos.
If you generate fake likes to try to get more people to view the video, that drives the percentage likes up. If that succeeds in getting the video more organic views (by people not affliated with your fake campaign) but those people don't like it, it drives the percentage likes back down. And your video drops back down into obscurity (unless you've got one helluva fake like-generating network). And your campaign to artificially increase how often the video is viewed is unsuccessful (after an initial brief success, how brief depends on the size of your fake campaign).
OTOH, if you generate fake dislikes and try to use the likes vs dislikes ratio to determine which videos are worth watching, then the fake dislikes crater the ratio, and bury the video into obscurity. The video gets fewer organic views (instead of more as with positive-like bombing), making it less able to recover from the fake reviews. And your campaign to bury the video into obscurity is successful.
In other words, a fake like campaign makes it easier for organic viewers to counter the campaign. A fake dislike campaign makes it harder for organic viewers to counter the campaign.
Plastic thrown away in trash cans and as household garbage. These plastics end up in a landfill, meaning it's buried underground. Which happens to be where the petroleum to make the plastic originally came from. So it has zero net environmental impact (unless you plan to go digging up landfills).
Plastic thrown away on the streets, in the landscape, and in the water. These plastics mar the environment and cause all the problems we're hearing about (plastic in the oceans, microplastics in the food chain, animals being wrapped up and dying in plastic waste).
Now, if they're going to convert plastic into fuel, which plastic do you think they're going to use? Obviously the former. Meaning (1) it will have zero effect on plastic pollution in the environment, and (2) you're just spending extra energy and money to convert petroleum byproducts into fuel, instead of just using new petroleum as fuel. You're just paying extra to swap carbon sequestered underground as plastics, for carbon sequestered underground as natural petroleum.
Any solution to address environmental plastic pollution must address the non-collection problem. That means either enforcing proper disposal of plastic waste, designing plastic waste to degrade more quickly in the environment, or reducing the use of plastics entirely. This plastic to fuel idea does none of these things. The only thing it does is reduce the space taken up in landfills.
Apple has had great success with their ARM SoC design,
I suspect a large part of this success is not due to technical superiority, but getting priority at newer (lower power) fabs due to Apple's large volume of orders. Their Ax processors were the first to use the smaller lithography available from fabs, which meant a corresponding reduction in power consumption for the same level of performance (or alternatively, better performance at the same power consumption). Back when they still used Samsung as a fab, even Samsung Semiconductor prioritized Apple's order ahead of Samsung Mobile's own Exynos SoCs.
If you remember the whole mess over the Nvidia Maxwell GPUs (the 8xx and 9xx series) not performing as expected, it's for the same reason. Nvidia assumed they'd be able to use TSMC's new 16nm and Samsung's new 14nm processes to manufacture Maxwell, and designed Maxwell assuming the thermal limits of those lithographies. But Apple's order for Ax processors bumped them down in the queue. That forced Nvidia to manufacture Maxwell on 28nm, leading it to overheat until they redesigned it with fewer cores, meaning it under-performed. It was so bad they actually re-used the Kepler architecture (700x series) for their higher-end mobile 8xx GPUs, since it was already optimized for the thermals of 28nm. Pascal (10xx series) was manufactured on 14nm and 16nm as expected, and was a success.
Any news service not wanting Google to display their articles in Google News just needs to add robots.txt file to their website which asks Google not to index their site. Google will then not index the site, and they will not show up in any Google News article or web searches. That these news services don't do this with a simple robots.txt file tells you their true motivations.
The only reason this proposed law exists is because these news services want to force Google to index them, and also pay them. That is, they want the service Google is offering, but instead of paying for a desired service (or accepting it for free, which is what Google currently does) like everyone else does for something they want, they instead want Google to pay them for it.
It's like someone building a road to make it easier for people to reach a shopping mall. Then the stores in the shopping mall demanding the road owner pay them because the road would not get the traffic it does if it weren't for the presence of the stores. The correct base level of comparison here is before the road was built. The road results in increasing traffic to the stores, so it is already a benefit to the stores (the road owner is already "paying" them via increased visitors). It's completely backwards from how an economics is supposed to work. And the misguided belief only exists because these copyright holders have been living in a protected bubble provided by the monopoly copyright law gives them, which shields them from normal economic forces.
The U.S., UK, and Ireland use common law (aka case law), meaning the law is subject to interpretation by judges. And the interpretation by other judges in previous cases can result in the meaning of the law changing.
Outside of the UK and Ireland, all of Europe uses civil law. The law is as written and passed by the legislature, and not open to interpretation. It is in fact set it stone. If there is an ambiguity or contradiction with other laws, it needs to be fixed by the legislature by changing the law.
This country was built on public works and institutions. Unfortunately in the past 70 years or so we have moved steadily away from this and toward the notion that everything has to make a profit to be useful. To some there is no profit that does not equal monetary profit.
Everything does have to be profitable to be useful. Being profitable means that the buyer finds something more useful than the seller, and conducts the purchase or trade. That determination is essential to improving the efficiency of your economy, and thus increasing overall productivity. Products or services which are not profitable cost more than they contribute to the economy, and thus are a net drain on the economy (lowers productivity and thus the average standard of living).
Public works and institutions still have to be profitable to be worthwhile. The profit is just not obvious because the payer (the government) is not the direct beneficiary (the public). A bridge connecting two metropolitan areas is probably profitable - the cost of building the bridge is likely less than the increase in commerce and travel (tourism) the bridge allows. So the bridge results in a increase in economic activity, which more than pays for the cost of building the bridge, and is a net economic gain (is profitable). But a bridge to nowhere has a cost which far exceeds the economic benefit to the public, and represents a public works project which is non-profitable, and thus an example of government waste.
Don't let a hatred of money blind you to this fundamental economic fact. Money is just an abstracted representation of productivity. The true currency is productivity. And more profit means using the same amount of resources to generate more productivity. Money, by virtue of being an abstracted representation, can be disassociated from actual productivity. Gambling is not not productive, but you can make a helluva lot of money doing it. Same for theft, corruption, and scams. But productivity cannot be abstracted or stolen this way. Economic profit is a direct result of improving productivity. Condemning profit is what leads you down a tortured path of economic devastation and reduced standard of living.
I had an Epic 4G. It supported WiMax, which was a legit 4G service. It lost out to LTE due to higher power consumption and inferior bandwidth utilization. Sprint eventually converted its WiMax towers to LTE, but that was long after I'd replaced the phone. In the areas which had WiMax coverage, I typically got 15-20 Mbps, vs about 1-3 Mbps for 3G. (Course the phone wold die in 2 hours from the battery drain of using WiMax...)
False advertising is the jurisdiction of the FTC. The FCC just licenses the airwaves and how they're used. It doesn't regulate what the licencees decide to call it (LTE, WiMax, UMTS, HSDPA, etc - I'm an engineer and love acronyms as much as any other engineer, but I really wish these things had gotten better names). We all love to crap on Ajit Pai, but this really is outside the FCC's jurisdiction.
A UBI actually gets worse the more you scale it up. On the small scale, the amount of productivity shifted away from each taxpayer to a UBI recipient is smaller, almost negligible. Basically all of Finland paid for these 2000 people's UBI during this experiment. If Finland (5.5 million population) has 4 million working people, then each UBI recipient had their UBI paid for by 2000 workers. So each working Finn paid $685 / 2000 = 0.34, or 34 cents/month to support these UBI recipients. If you then scaled it up to 200,000 people receiving a UBI, then the cost of the UBI to each individual Finland resident is 100x more than during this experiment. Each UBI recipient would be supported by just 20 workers, or $34/mo. If this experiment with just 2000 recipients found little benefit, then scaling it up will result in a similar little benefit while simultaneously increasing the cost per working citizen. For this experiment to have been successful with just 2000 recipients, the benefits would've had to have been fantastically clear and evident, in order to survive being scaled up to the entire population.
All the arguments I've seen put forth by the UBI advocates ignore one fundamental fact - the value of money is not fixed. Money in itself does not have value. It is just a representation of value. That's why if you passed a law doubling everyone's bank accounts and paychecks overnight, it would have absolutely zero impact. Prices, valuations, and loan amounts would also double overnight. And the net result would be everything is exactly the same as before, just the numerical money values for everything (prices, paychecks, etc) would be x2.
The true fundamental currency is productivity. Productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed must first be produced. For you to buy a TV, someone has to make the TV. For you to be served in a restaurant, someone at the restaurant has to do the serving. So the only way you can increase the average standard of living is by increasing productivity per capita. That allows you to increase consumption per capita, which is equivalent to an increased standard of living.
Anything which doesn't increase productivity is just a shell game of moving stuff around. Joe consumes less, and the reduction in his consumption is transferred to Frank so he can consume more. It's zero-sum, maybe even negative sum if you factor in the cost of moving stuff around.
That's all a UBI does - move stuff around. Worse yet, it moves consumption away from productive people, and towards unproductive people (jobless). If that results in a net reduction in productivity, then the UBI will result in lowering the average standard of living. Doesn't matter how the money works out - the value of money can change due to inflation or deflation so everyone's income might actually go up. But because productivity is conserved, the money amounts don't matter. If something causes a net reduction in productivity, it results in a decrease in the average standard of living.
From a productivity standpoint, the only benefits I've been able to think of for a UBI are a possible reduction in crime rate, and a potential decrease in bankruptcy rate (which can temporarily knock a person down from being productive to non-productive, and sends an economic shock through the system as defaulting on loans can possibly trigger chain bankruptcies). On the flip side, it erodes the single most important incentive for increasing productivity - the suffering that comes with being unproductive (jobless) and unable to afford to consume anything.
The bulk of the homeless, maybe even the majority, are mentally ill. Reagan shut down the mental hospitals (aka insane asylums) in the 1980s with the idea that the states should fund them like they did every other medial expense except Medicare. The states never picked up the tab, so they closed down, and all those people got dumped on the streets.
A lot of the rest are probably like you (I assume, since you don't give any financial details). Smart, well-educated, and capable of doing a decent job at work. But financially illiterate. I worked for a couple years at a job making $30k. I was shocked by how many of my co-workers at the same salary range lived paycheck-to-paycheck. Their MO seemed to be to deposit their paycheck in their bank account, and pay their monthly bills. After those were covered, they'd use money for impulse buys until the ATM said their bank account was empty, Then they'd hunker down and try to make it until the next paycheck. "The ATM says I don't have any more money" was a phrase I heard all too often. I never understood how those paycheck advance loan places stayed in business until I saw how common this lifestyle was. And it explained why so many people go into credit card debt (I pay mine off every month and thought everyone else did too, until I saw how my co-workers lived).
In the meantime, I (on the same salary mind you) was scrupulous, maybe even paranoid, to save what money I could. I didn't go to movie theaters, preferring to rent a video with friends so we could all watch it together. I rarely ate out, taking the time to prepare most of my own meals, and tried to encourage my friends to hold potluck-style get-togethers instead of eating out. When I did eat out, I always drank water instead of ordering a $2 soda or coffee. Speaking of which I never paid more than $1 for a beverage, and the first time I walked into a Starbucks and saw the prices, I was so shocked it almost ruined the date. On road trips I'd always try to arrange as many people as we could squeeze into the car to go along so we could share fuel, entrance, and parking expenses. All while paying for my own health and dental insurance (paranoia helped there). By the end of the year I'd saved up enough to buy myself a couple thousand dollars worth of new photo equipment as a Christmas present to myself, which still retaining a savings buffer big enough to cover almost 6 months of expenses.
I look back on my high school education, and what was missing, what's badly needed, was a semester-long course on financial management. How to balance your monthly expenses (used to be balancing your checkbook). The importance of creating a monthly budget (which is trivial now that you can run a spreadsheet on your phone for free). What the interest rate on your savings account means long-term. How those little maintenance and late fees build up over a year to eat a sizeable chunk of your savings. The power of compounding interest, and why it's better to save up and wait to buy a big ticket item, rather than take a loan to get it immediately. How insurance works and when it is/isn't a good idea to use it (if you can't afford to pay for a failure, you need to buy insurance). The difference between gambling, insurance, and investing in stocks (yes there's a difference - if you think there isn't then count yourself among the financially illiterate). Taxes, how to file them, the different options (standard deduction vs itemized), common deductions and exemptions so you know what kinds of spending are encouraged by our tax code, heck, what the difference is between a deduction and exemption and credit. And a brief tutorial on investing, so you know how to compare all the different options like a savings account vs CD vs money market fund vs mutual fund vs stocks vs municipal bonds. Your credit report, what helps you get good credit, what gives you bad credit, and how you can detect and expunge wrong info from your report. What all those terms and conditions mean when taking out a loan/mort
Trenching costs about $5-$10 per foot for equipment and labor for a 24 inch deep trench. That's about $25k-$50k per mile. And you'd need to apply and pay for permits in a lot of areas. Some accountant at Google probably figured they could save a ton of money by trenching only 2 inches, and overruled the engineers who told him it was a dumb idea.
B.S. My cable internet connection was 5 Mbps in 1998. It's 150 Mbps today. That massive speedup did not come at the expense of slowing down someone else's connection speed.
The problem with fast lanes / paid prioritization is not that the extra speed must come at someone else's expense. It can come at someone else's expense. Or it can come from improving the infrastructure. The problem with fast lanes / paid prioritization is that the customer can't tell which case is happening. This creates an incentive for ISPs to try to cheat and use it to try to sneak in a speed reduction for some customers without a corresponding reduction in their price.
If you're going to make paid prioritization legal, then it must come with the stipulation that the slowest speeds regular customers experience cannot become slower. If it does become slower, the ISP should be required to lower prices for those customers by a proportional amount. That removes the incentive to cheat and degrade connection speeds for non-fast lane customers, while preserving the carrot of the ISPs getting paid extra for giving faster connection speeds to the customers who want it. The result then is same or faster speeds for everyone.
The cell phones are made by Motorola Mobility, which was bought by Google (for its telecommunications patent portfolio) and sold to Lenovo (after stripping out most of the patents).
Motorola's semiconductor business was spun off as Freescale Semiconductor in 2004, and operated independently for a decade. Freescale was bought by NXP Semiconductors (a Dutch company) in 2015.
As you surmise, buying and renting are the same thing in the long-term. If you pay $200 for Office and upgrade to a new version every 5 years, you're paying the same as renting it for $40/yr. So in terms of cost, there's really no difference between buying and renting. If you buy a car for $30k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15k, you've paid the same as leasing it for $250/mo. Whether the subscription price is better or worse just depends on the price points and how often you normally upgrade. Office 365 is a bit overpriced IMHO (since most people only need Word and Excel). But Adobe Creative Cloud for Photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) is pretty close to what I was paying to keep Lightroom and Photoshop updated (Adobe actually adds useful new features which make upgrading compelling, like a better healing brush, better noise reduction, filter to fix focus or camera shake).
The real difference is on Microsoft's end. If they sell copies of software, they have to keep separate teams to maintain Office 2019, Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010 - for however many years until they EOL it and discontinue support. OTOH if they offer only a subscription, they can just drop the teams supporting Office 2010, 2013, and 2016, and force everyone to upgrade to the 2019 version. I ran across the downside of this recently. A client's custom software which ran fine on Windows 7 and early versions of Windows 10, would no longer work on current versions of Windows 10. There's no way to revert back to an earlier build of Windows 10 (Microsoft drops support after about 9 months and forces you to upgrade). So the client had to pay to have their custom software modified so it'd work on the current version of Windows 10.
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It's not regulatory capture which distorts the market. It's a quasi-monopoly. The places I've seen this behavior (missing a leg of a flight) benefit passengers most is at airports where one airline dominates - a hub. Back when Northwest was still around, Detroit was one of their hubs. Something like 80% of all the flights in and out of Detroit were Northwest. That reduced competition meant that Northwest had undue influence over the pricing for tickets in and out of Detroit. They exploited that to charge excessively high prices for tickets starting and ending in Detroit.
But because Detroit was their hub, that meant a ton of flights between other cities made stopovers in Detroit to change planes. The other cities had plenty of competition so their fares were priced a lot closer to the airline's cost. That's what creates the opportunity for people to book flights between different cities at a lower price, and get off at Detroit (missing the last leg). So it's not strictly arbitrage per se, it's just bypassing the airline's quasi-monopoly pricing at a particular airport. (Higher pricing at airports with competition are usually due to fees charged by the different airports. e.g. Flights to/from Los Angeles International are cheaper than to/from Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, or Orange County because the same agency operates all those airports but charges the lowest fees for LAX.)
I used a similar tactic to visit my sister for free when she was at the University of Michigan, and I was in Boston. Whenever I flew home to visit my parents in California, I'd book a flight with a layover in Detroit, and deliberately maximize the layover time (which gave me about 4 hours there). My sister would meet me at the airport, we'd go out and have a meal together and talk and catch up, and I'd take any presents she wanted me to bring my parents.
Overbooking is not cheating the customer. Overbooking is a cost-cutting measure. That is, its purpose benefits the customer.
The cost of a flight to an airline is fixed. The average cost of a flight per passenger is thus minimized when the airline can maximize the number of people aboard each flight. How do you maximize the number of passengers per flight when (1) you have no guarantee how many seats will be sold each time (i.e. the number of people wanting to fly varies randomly each flight), and (2) some people buy refundable tickets and may change flights at the last minute? That is, the number of passengers who will actually fly varies.
It's like preparing snacks for a party where you're asking attendees to pay a $5 cover fee to pay for the snacks. If you send out 100 invites and prepare enough snacks for 100 guests, your average party expenses per guest will be higher because not everyone who's invited will always show up. But if you only prepare enough snacks for 90 guests, then your average party expenses per guest will be lower. It just introduces the additional risk of running out of snacks if more than 90 people happen to show up (you've overbooked). If people were willing to pay extra, then you could just buy enough snacks for 100 people all the time. But people have historically demonstrated that minimizing the amount they pay is the #1 priority for most people. So allowing overbooking is what allows you to give those people what they want most - a lower price.
In reality, there are two other possible modes of causation. And those two are probably more likely to be the correct ones.
He already paid U.S. taxes on all the money when he earned it in the U.S. And there's no Canadian law requiring you to pay any Canadian taxes on money you bring into the country.
Canada taxes based on where you live. He was a Canadian citizen living in the U.S., so not subject to Canadian taxes on the money he earned while living in the U.S. I have several Canadian friends who work in the U.S. They have to be careful to monitor the time they spend visiting Canada on vacations and such. If they began (or ended) work in the U.S. partway through the year, and their visits to Canada push them over 183 days in Canada for the year, suddenly they are a Canadian resident for the year and owe Canadian taxes on everything they made. The U.S. taxes the money anyway since it was earned in the U.S.
I went through the reverse situation (U.S. citizen working in Canada). The U.S. taxes not just based on where you earned the money, but also on citizenship. So I was subject to double-taxation. Canada taxed my income because my job was in Canada. The U.S. taxed my income because I was a U.S. citizen. The two countries have a tax treaty so I only paid the greater of the two income taxes on my wages. But the treaty only covered earned income (you can apply your Canadian earned income tax bill as a credit to your U.S. earned income tax bill). If I had lived in Canada, any unearned income - interest from a savings account, investments, sales of stock which had appreciated, etc - would've been subject to double taxation. Both countries would've made me pay taxes on it. So I ended up living just across the border in the U.S. and commuted to work in Canada, and telecommuted often enough so I never passed 183 days per year in Canada.
California was another small nightmare. California taxes based on citizenship as well, and will still try to claim you are a California citizen (resident) even if you move to another country, and will try to make you pay California taxes on everything you make abroad. To thwart them, you first have to set up residency in another state before you move abroad. Preferably a state with no income taxes so they don't try to pull the same thing. So even if I had decided to live in Canada, I would've first had to have lived in Washington state long enough to get a driver's license there to officially shed my California residency.
The fees actually aren't your biggest concern. Exchange rates are always fluctuating. When I moved most of my Canadian funds back to the U.S., I did it a little at a time over a span of a couple months. If I had transferred it all at once, I could've lost a lot of money to a transient blip in the exchange rate. That happened to the owner of the company I was working at. He panicked when the U.S. Dollar began falling in Sept-Oct 2007 and converted all of the company's U.S. funds to Canadian in early November 2007. That happened to be
You're improperly comparing to a zero base state - post-surgery death vs if the person were living a normal life and didn't need surgery. That leads you to the incorrect conclusion that "something is wrong" when someone dies after surgery.
The correct comparison is is against what would've happened to the person if they hadn't gone into surgery. Except for cosmetic surgery, going to the OR is usually to treat a life-threatening problem. 4.2 million deaths after surgery vs 313 million surgical procedures is a 1.3% chance of death post-surgery. People opt for surgery because that's a helluva improvement over the ~50% chance of death if they hadn't gone into surgery.
The same miguided argument is used against vaccines. A few dozen children die from vaccines each year. Anti-vaxxers (comparing to a zero base state of no deaths) cite that as evidence that vaccines are unsafe. But the correct comparison is a few dozen deaths from vaccines, vs the tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths if nobody were vaccinated. We opt for vaccines and surgery because they're the lesser of two evils (far, far lesser).
Another example is the crash of United Airlines 232. One of the passengers was a lap child - an infant or small child carried on the parents' lap and traveling without paying for a seat. The head stewardess abroad the flight followed procedure and instructed the parents to put the lap child underneath the seat in front of them like carry-on luggage. When the child died, she was so racked with guilt that she went on a multi-decade crusade to get lap children banned. The FAA finally ruled against her a few years ago. She was incorrectly comparing against a zero base state - the lap child dying vs possibly surviving if it had been belted into a seat. The FAA made the correct comparison. Lap children are allowed because flying is two orders of magnitude safer than driving. If you forced all parents with small children to pay for a seat for those children, a lot of them would opt to drive instead of fly. And as a result a lot more children would die from car accidents than this one lap child on this one ill-fated flight.
Instead of being frustrated over not knowing why the "unnecessary" death occurred, treat it as a gamble. The patient's original status gave him, say, a 50% chance of survival. Surgery gives him a 98.7% chance of survival. So surgery is obviously the better bet and wiser choice. But 1.3% of the time you will still lose that bet. It still boils down to the luck of the draw, except with surgery (and vaccines and lap children) you are stacking the deck far, far in your favor.
We can and certainly should try to improve the 1.3% fatality rate following surgery. But 1.3% is still a good thing, not something to be ashamed or fearful of. People are making jokes because TFA is naively trying to spin this story as if surgery were an additional risk, when it's actually a reduction in risk.
My guess would be the 6 digit passcode was the weak link. It's pretty easy to watch someone entering it, especially in a crowded place like a school. Once they're in, if the phone has gmail loaded, they can access the gmail account without knowing the password.
Gmail normally prevents someone from changing the gmail password without knowing the old password. But if you've got the phone set up as their pseudo-2FA, then a password reset request will just send a one-time code as a text message to the phone, making it trivial for the phone thief to change the gmail password. For real 2FA, use Authy. Not Google's Authenticator - it becomes compromised the moment the device you've installed it on is compromised. Authy requires you to enter an extra PIN or password every time you use it.
Wouldn't have mattered. If the gmail address was the email on record for the Apple ID account, it was compromised the moment the gmail account was compromised. So the same thing would've happened regardless of what email service he was using. If you're really paranoid I suppose you could set up a separate gmail account to handle accounts and password resets, and not login to that unless needed. But I've found that that just results in you missing critical messages about an account expiring or changes being made to it.
The best protection is to solidify the security on whatever email account you're using (be it gmail, hotmail, yahoo, whatever). Enable real 2FA on it (not the fake "well send you a text or an email" 2FA), and use Authy instead of Authenticator. Gmail in particular gives you the option to create a half dozen one-time-use codes to bypass real 2FA. Generate them, print them, lock them in a safe deposit box. Use Authy from that point on. If something should happen to Authy (it shouldn't since your credentials are stored encrypted on their servers), you can get a bypass code from your safe deposit box and use that.
For the Millennials among you, no that's not what websites looked like in the 1990s. At least not the functional ones. That Marvel site uses just about every cliched bad web site feature that was offered on GeoCities. That was a site where you could make your own web page without buying a domain, paying for hosting, or knowing how to code HTML Sort of a predecessor to Facebook and MySpace. It was designed to be easy to use, meaning that the clueless masses flocked to it and generated horrific websites which were gaudy, tasteless, and difficult to navigate. (Thankfully they've spared you blinking text, and a background which didn't scroll with the page leaving you confused if you were actually scrolling.)
Try Philip Greenspun's website for an inkling of what a functional site looked like in the 1990s. He was the original creator of photo.net, and his home site still uses the old layout and HTML coding used for the original photo.net. This was before drop-down menus, multiple column support, client-side scripting, in-line video, and (thankfully) in-line audio. Most people were on dialup so if you didn't want people to immediately leave your site, you used a small low-res version of any pictures which linked to a high-res version. You might notice the pages load a helluva lot faster than any modern site.
I wonder how many of these people were protected by helicopter parents from ever touching a hot stove, or having hot water from the bathtub spigot splash onto them. These aren't bad experiences we need to be protected from. We need to experience them in situations where the potential harm is small, so we can learn. That way, later in life we do not intentionally create stupid situations where where their potential harm is much greater.
A single candle won't. But a candle gives off about 50-100 Watts of thermal energy. It's actually close to the thermal output of a human body at rest (about 80-100 Watts). So if the overriding survival concern was temperature (instead of, say, pollutants in the air), then yes, one or two candles will put out as much heat as having another person in the room. And two or three dozen candles will put out as much heat as a 1500W space heater.
People just think candles are weak because they are spectacularly inefficient as a light source. IIRC only 0.04% of the energy goes into light; the rest is given off as heat. So that Earth Day tradition where businesses turn off their 12% efficient T8 fluorescent ceiling lights and use candles instead actually wastes a phenomenal amount of energy. A single T8 bulb consumes 32 Watts, or about as much as those small tea candles. But puts out a helluva lot more light.
Just build up a database of which videos I've viewed, which ones I've liked, and which ones I've disliked and generate a preference profile on me. Do this for everyone and generate preference profiles for every account. Find people with a similar preference profile as me and recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to like. Don't recommend to me videos they've watched and tend to dislike. People with a substantially different preference profile should have no effect on what's recommended to me.
Do this for every account, and the only thing a dislike-bombing campaign does is change which videos are recommended to people likely to participate in that particular dislike-bombing campaign. Which presumably is what they want since their profile says they're likely to participate in that campaign. That is, if your video preference profile is similar to those of people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the video will not be recommended to you (though you probably never would have watched it anyway if it hadn't been for the dislike-bombing campaign). If your preference profile is different from those people in the dislike-bombing campaign, then the campaign will have zero effect on whether or not the video is recommended to you.
Netflix does this. The list of recommended movies you see is based on how closely that movie matches with other movies you've seen (based on the movie-watching history of other Netflix customers).
Although it's harder to see why today than it was in the past. Long, long ago, YouTube allowed you to see a like vs viewed ratio. That's the value that's really important - what percentage of people who viewed a video liked it? I dunno why YouTube removed it, but presumably it's still used in their internal "recommended for you" algorithm. Otherwise new videos would never be recommended because they always have fewer likes than older liked videos.
If you generate fake likes to try to get more people to view the video, that drives the percentage likes up. If that succeeds in getting the video more organic views (by people not affliated with your fake campaign) but those people don't like it, it drives the percentage likes back down. And your video drops back down into obscurity (unless you've got one helluva fake like-generating network). And your campaign to artificially increase how often the video is viewed is unsuccessful (after an initial brief success, how brief depends on the size of your fake campaign).
OTOH, if you generate fake dislikes and try to use the likes vs dislikes ratio to determine which videos are worth watching, then the fake dislikes crater the ratio, and bury the video into obscurity. The video gets fewer organic views (instead of more as with positive-like bombing), making it less able to recover from the fake reviews. And your campaign to bury the video into obscurity is successful.
In other words, a fake like campaign makes it easier for organic viewers to counter the campaign. A fake dislike campaign makes it harder for organic viewers to counter the campaign.
Now, if they're going to convert plastic into fuel, which plastic do you think they're going to use? Obviously the former. Meaning (1) it will have zero effect on plastic pollution in the environment, and (2) you're just spending extra energy and money to convert petroleum byproducts into fuel, instead of just using new petroleum as fuel. You're just paying extra to swap carbon sequestered underground as plastics, for carbon sequestered underground as natural petroleum.
Any solution to address environmental plastic pollution must address the non-collection problem. That means either enforcing proper disposal of plastic waste, designing plastic waste to degrade more quickly in the environment, or reducing the use of plastics entirely. This plastic to fuel idea does none of these things. The only thing it does is reduce the space taken up in landfills.
I suspect a large part of this success is not due to technical superiority, but getting priority at newer (lower power) fabs due to Apple's large volume of orders. Their Ax processors were the first to use the smaller lithography available from fabs, which meant a corresponding reduction in power consumption for the same level of performance (or alternatively, better performance at the same power consumption). Back when they still used Samsung as a fab, even Samsung Semiconductor prioritized Apple's order ahead of Samsung Mobile's own Exynos SoCs.
If you remember the whole mess over the Nvidia Maxwell GPUs (the 8xx and 9xx series) not performing as expected, it's for the same reason. Nvidia assumed they'd be able to use TSMC's new 16nm and Samsung's new 14nm processes to manufacture Maxwell, and designed Maxwell assuming the thermal limits of those lithographies. But Apple's order for Ax processors bumped them down in the queue. That forced Nvidia to manufacture Maxwell on 28nm, leading it to overheat until they redesigned it with fewer cores, meaning it under-performed. It was so bad they actually re-used the Kepler architecture (700x series) for their higher-end mobile 8xx GPUs, since it was already optimized for the thermals of 28nm. Pascal (10xx series) was manufactured on 14nm and 16nm as expected, and was a success.
Any news service not wanting Google to display their articles in Google News just needs to add robots.txt file to their website which asks Google not to index their site. Google will then not index the site, and they will not show up in any Google News article or web searches. That these news services don't do this with a simple robots.txt file tells you their true motivations.
The only reason this proposed law exists is because these news services want to force Google to index them, and also pay them. That is, they want the service Google is offering, but instead of paying for a desired service (or accepting it for free, which is what Google currently does) like everyone else does for something they want, they instead want Google to pay them for it.
It's like someone building a road to make it easier for people to reach a shopping mall. Then the stores in the shopping mall demanding the road owner pay them because the road would not get the traffic it does if it weren't for the presence of the stores. The correct base level of comparison here is before the road was built. The road results in increasing traffic to the stores, so it is already a benefit to the stores (the road owner is already "paying" them via increased visitors). It's completely backwards from how an economics is supposed to work. And the misguided belief only exists because these copyright holders have been living in a protected bubble provided by the monopoly copyright law gives them, which shields them from normal economic forces.
You have that backwards.
The U.S., UK, and Ireland use common law (aka case law), meaning the law is subject to interpretation by judges. And the interpretation by other judges in previous cases can result in the meaning of the law changing.
Outside of the UK and Ireland, all of Europe uses civil law. The law is as written and passed by the legislature, and not open to interpretation. It is in fact set it stone. If there is an ambiguity or contradiction with other laws, it needs to be fixed by the legislature by changing the law.
Everything does have to be profitable to be useful. Being profitable means that the buyer finds something more useful than the seller, and conducts the purchase or trade. That determination is essential to improving the efficiency of your economy, and thus increasing overall productivity. Products or services which are not profitable cost more than they contribute to the economy, and thus are a net drain on the economy (lowers productivity and thus the average standard of living).
Public works and institutions still have to be profitable to be worthwhile. The profit is just not obvious because the payer (the government) is not the direct beneficiary (the public). A bridge connecting two metropolitan areas is probably profitable - the cost of building the bridge is likely less than the increase in commerce and travel (tourism) the bridge allows. So the bridge results in a increase in economic activity, which more than pays for the cost of building the bridge, and is a net economic gain (is profitable). But a bridge to nowhere has a cost which far exceeds the economic benefit to the public, and represents a public works project which is non-profitable, and thus an example of government waste.
Don't let a hatred of money blind you to this fundamental economic fact. Money is just an abstracted representation of productivity. The true currency is productivity. And more profit means using the same amount of resources to generate more productivity. Money, by virtue of being an abstracted representation, can be disassociated from actual productivity. Gambling is not not productive, but you can make a helluva lot of money doing it. Same for theft, corruption, and scams. But productivity cannot be abstracted or stolen this way. Economic profit is a direct result of improving productivity. Condemning profit is what leads you down a tortured path of economic devastation and reduced standard of living.
I had an Epic 4G. It supported WiMax, which was a legit 4G service. It lost out to LTE due to higher power consumption and inferior bandwidth utilization. Sprint eventually converted its WiMax towers to LTE, but that was long after I'd replaced the phone. In the areas which had WiMax coverage, I typically got 15-20 Mbps, vs about 1-3 Mbps for 3G. (Course the phone wold die in 2 hours from the battery drain of using WiMax...)
False advertising is the jurisdiction of the FTC. The FCC just licenses the airwaves and how they're used. It doesn't regulate what the licencees decide to call it (LTE, WiMax, UMTS, HSDPA, etc - I'm an engineer and love acronyms as much as any other engineer, but I really wish these things had gotten better names). We all love to crap on Ajit Pai, but this really is outside the FCC's jurisdiction.
A UBI actually gets worse the more you scale it up. On the small scale, the amount of productivity shifted away from each taxpayer to a UBI recipient is smaller, almost negligible. Basically all of Finland paid for these 2000 people's UBI during this experiment. If Finland (5.5 million population) has 4 million working people, then each UBI recipient had their UBI paid for by 2000 workers. So each working Finn paid $685 / 2000 = 0.34, or 34 cents/month to support these UBI recipients. If you then scaled it up to 200,000 people receiving a UBI, then the cost of the UBI to each individual Finland resident is 100x more than during this experiment. Each UBI recipient would be supported by just 20 workers, or $34/mo. If this experiment with just 2000 recipients found little benefit, then scaling it up will result in a similar little benefit while simultaneously increasing the cost per working citizen. For this experiment to have been successful with just 2000 recipients, the benefits would've had to have been fantastically clear and evident, in order to survive being scaled up to the entire population.
All the arguments I've seen put forth by the UBI advocates ignore one fundamental fact - the value of money is not fixed. Money in itself does not have value. It is just a representation of value. That's why if you passed a law doubling everyone's bank accounts and paychecks overnight, it would have absolutely zero impact. Prices, valuations, and loan amounts would also double overnight. And the net result would be everything is exactly the same as before, just the numerical money values for everything (prices, paychecks, etc) would be x2.
The true fundamental currency is productivity. Productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed must first be produced. For you to buy a TV, someone has to make the TV. For you to be served in a restaurant, someone at the restaurant has to do the serving. So the only way you can increase the average standard of living is by increasing productivity per capita. That allows you to increase consumption per capita, which is equivalent to an increased standard of living.
Anything which doesn't increase productivity is just a shell game of moving stuff around. Joe consumes less, and the reduction in his consumption is transferred to Frank so he can consume more. It's zero-sum, maybe even negative sum if you factor in the cost of moving stuff around.
That's all a UBI does - move stuff around. Worse yet, it moves consumption away from productive people, and towards unproductive people (jobless). If that results in a net reduction in productivity, then the UBI will result in lowering the average standard of living. Doesn't matter how the money works out - the value of money can change due to inflation or deflation so everyone's income might actually go up. But because productivity is conserved, the money amounts don't matter. If something causes a net reduction in productivity, it results in a decrease in the average standard of living.
From a productivity standpoint, the only benefits I've been able to think of for a UBI are a possible reduction in crime rate, and a potential decrease in bankruptcy rate (which can temporarily knock a person down from being productive to non-productive, and sends an economic shock through the system as defaulting on loans can possibly trigger chain bankruptcies). On the flip side, it erodes the single most important incentive for increasing productivity - the suffering that comes with being unproductive (jobless) and unable to afford to consume anything.
The bulk of the homeless, maybe even the majority, are mentally ill. Reagan shut down the mental hospitals (aka insane asylums) in the 1980s with the idea that the states should fund them like they did every other medial expense except Medicare. The states never picked up the tab, so they closed down, and all those people got dumped on the streets.
A lot of the rest are probably like you (I assume, since you don't give any financial details). Smart, well-educated, and capable of doing a decent job at work. But financially illiterate. I worked for a couple years at a job making $30k. I was shocked by how many of my co-workers at the same salary range lived paycheck-to-paycheck. Their MO seemed to be to deposit their paycheck in their bank account, and pay their monthly bills. After those were covered, they'd use money for impulse buys until the ATM said their bank account was empty, Then they'd hunker down and try to make it until the next paycheck. "The ATM says I don't have any more money" was a phrase I heard all too often. I never understood how those paycheck advance loan places stayed in business until I saw how common this lifestyle was. And it explained why so many people go into credit card debt (I pay mine off every month and thought everyone else did too, until I saw how my co-workers lived).
In the meantime, I (on the same salary mind you) was scrupulous, maybe even paranoid, to save what money I could. I didn't go to movie theaters, preferring to rent a video with friends so we could all watch it together. I rarely ate out, taking the time to prepare most of my own meals, and tried to encourage my friends to hold potluck-style get-togethers instead of eating out. When I did eat out, I always drank water instead of ordering a $2 soda or coffee. Speaking of which I never paid more than $1 for a beverage, and the first time I walked into a Starbucks and saw the prices, I was so shocked it almost ruined the date. On road trips I'd always try to arrange as many people as we could squeeze into the car to go along so we could share fuel, entrance, and parking expenses. All while paying for my own health and dental insurance (paranoia helped there). By the end of the year I'd saved up enough to buy myself a couple thousand dollars worth of new photo equipment as a Christmas present to myself, which still retaining a savings buffer big enough to cover almost 6 months of expenses.
I look back on my high school education, and what was missing, what's badly needed, was a semester-long course on financial management. How to balance your monthly expenses (used to be balancing your checkbook). The importance of creating a monthly budget (which is trivial now that you can run a spreadsheet on your phone for free). What the interest rate on your savings account means long-term. How those little maintenance and late fees build up over a year to eat a sizeable chunk of your savings. The power of compounding interest, and why it's better to save up and wait to buy a big ticket item, rather than take a loan to get it immediately. How insurance works and when it is/isn't a good idea to use it (if you can't afford to pay for a failure, you need to buy insurance). The difference between gambling, insurance, and investing in stocks (yes there's a difference - if you think there isn't then count yourself among the financially illiterate). Taxes, how to file them, the different options (standard deduction vs itemized), common deductions and exemptions so you know what kinds of spending are encouraged by our tax code, heck, what the difference is between a deduction and exemption and credit. And a brief tutorial on investing, so you know how to compare all the different options like a savings account vs CD vs money market fund vs mutual fund vs stocks vs municipal bonds. Your credit report, what helps you get good credit, what gives you bad credit, and how you can detect and expunge wrong info from your report. What all those terms and conditions mean when taking out a loan/mort
Trenching costs about $5-$10 per foot for equipment and labor for a 24 inch deep trench. That's about $25k-$50k per mile. And you'd need to apply and pay for permits in a lot of areas. Some accountant at Google probably figured they could save a ton of money by trenching only 2 inches, and overruled the engineers who told him it was a dumb idea.
B.S. My cable internet connection was 5 Mbps in 1998. It's 150 Mbps today. That massive speedup did not come at the expense of slowing down someone else's connection speed.
The problem with fast lanes / paid prioritization is not that the extra speed must come at someone else's expense. It can come at someone else's expense. Or it can come from improving the infrastructure. The problem with fast lanes / paid prioritization is that the customer can't tell which case is happening. This creates an incentive for ISPs to try to cheat and use it to try to sneak in a speed reduction for some customers without a corresponding reduction in their price.
If you're going to make paid prioritization legal, then it must come with the stipulation that the slowest speeds regular customers experience cannot become slower. If it does become slower, the ISP should be required to lower prices for those customers by a proportional amount. That removes the incentive to cheat and degrade connection speeds for non-fast lane customers, while preserving the carrot of the ISPs getting paid extra for giving faster connection speeds to the customers who want it. The result then is same or faster speeds for everyone.
The cell phones are made by Motorola Mobility, which was bought by Google (for its telecommunications patent portfolio) and sold to Lenovo (after stripping out most of the patents).
Motorola's semiconductor business was spun off as Freescale Semiconductor in 2004, and operated independently for a decade. Freescale was bought by NXP Semiconductors (a Dutch company) in 2015.
As you surmise, buying and renting are the same thing in the long-term. If you pay $200 for Office and upgrade to a new version every 5 years, you're paying the same as renting it for $40/yr. So in terms of cost, there's really no difference between buying and renting. If you buy a car for $30k, use it for 5 years, and sell it for $15k, you've paid the same as leasing it for $250/mo. Whether the subscription price is better or worse just depends on the price points and how often you normally upgrade. Office 365 is a bit overpriced IMHO (since most people only need Word and Excel). But Adobe Creative Cloud for Photography (Lightroom + Photoshop) is pretty close to what I was paying to keep Lightroom and Photoshop updated (Adobe actually adds useful new features which make upgrading compelling, like a better healing brush, better noise reduction, filter to fix focus or camera shake).
The real difference is on Microsoft's end. If they sell copies of software, they have to keep separate teams to maintain Office 2019, Office 2016, Office 2013, Office 2010 - for however many years until they EOL it and discontinue support. OTOH if they offer only a subscription, they can just drop the teams supporting Office 2010, 2013, and 2016, and force everyone to upgrade to the 2019 version. I ran across the downside of this recently. A client's custom software which ran fine on Windows 7 and early versions of Windows 10, would no longer work on current versions of Windows 10. There's no way to revert back to an earlier build of Windows 10 (Microsoft drops support after about 9 months and forces you to upgrade). So the client had to pay to have their custom software modified so it'd work on the current version of Windows 10.