it should also save power - no need for transmitting for all those packets, just the FM signal.
I doubt it. Streaming audio is such low bandwidth (about 128 kbps) that your phone's data radio can switch on, buffer several MB (1 MB = about 1 minute of audio) in a few seconds, then switch off. An FM radio needs to be powered on the entire time you're listening.
Really, the best argument for FM radio on phones is for emergency broadcasts in the event of a natural (or man-made) disaster, when the cellular network goes down. But a phone is a terrible device for that situation because you're probably not going to be able to recharge it for the duration of the disaster. And although a smartphone with the phone portion turned off will last nearly a week on battery, if you forget to put it in airplane mode (turn the cellular radio off) the phone will begin broadcasting at full power trying to find a tower and your battery will drain in probably a few hours. A car radio or transistor radio that takes AA batteries or even MP3 player with FM radio (if you've still got one of those) is better for that situation.
Buffet doesn't play the stock lottery. That is, he doesn't try to make money off of the appreciation in stock price from when he buys it to when he sells it. He concentrates on acquiring stocks of companies which he feels are solid long-term investments, and will allow him to make money off the dividends they pay.
Jobs hated paying dividends. Apple stopped paying them in 1995 to entice him to return to the helm, and didn't start paying them again until late-2012 after Jobs died. (For those who don't know, dividends are profits distributed to shareholders. Under Job's watch, Apple kept all its profits as retained earnings, making AAPL what's playfully called a baseball card stock. That is, a stock which doesn't pay dividends, so whose only value is being able to impress dinner guests by showing them that you own it, and how much you can get selling it to someone else. Google is still a baseball card stock - they don't pay dividends either.)
The $232.9 billion Apple has in the bank almost exactly matches its net profit during the time it didn't pay dividends (2005-2015 adds up to $232.78 billion). In other words, rather than paying stockholders dividends or investing the money into R&D and expansion like you're supposed to with retained earnings, Apple has just been putting it into a bank account. Kinda makes me think that was a condition Apple's board put on Job's policy of not paying dividends. Maybe Buffet has a hunch about what they're going to do with the money?
They aren't "claims". Those are the laws, policies, and the stats. You pay less in taxes in the US, but you're getting less in return and just having to pay somebody else (more) for those services. For health care, you're paying insurance companies and your paying with lower wages because your company is paying the insurance companies.
The same is true for taxes. You pay more in taxes, meaning you have less income. Or corporations are taxed, so they have to pay you a lower wage, or have to charge a higher price (meaning your dollar buys less - same thing as being paid less).
Once you realize this, you realize that it doesn't matter where in the economy you collect the taxes. The taxes could be borne 100% by individuals, or 100% by corporations, and the net effect would be exactly the same. See, the economy isn't about money. Money is just a way to enumerate what's going on, and it doesn't do it very well since the value of money itself can change. That's where most numerically literate people screw up - by trying to understand the economy in terms of money. That's like trying to take measurements in an experiment using a ruler which is always stretching and shrinking.
The economy is about productivity. Everything you consume has to be produced. There's simply no getting around that. If you buy a TV, someone had to make a TV. If you send a letter, someone has to deliver the letter. If you pay to have your house cleaned, someone has to clean your house. The only way you can increase your consumption (increase your standard of living) is if you increase your productivity. If the average person's productivity increases from producing 2 widgets a day to 4 widgets a day, their consumption can increase from 2 widgets a day to 4 widgets a day Usually the best way to improve economic efficiency in this manner is via market forces doing a random search of a ginormous solution space. Sometimes the best way is via government regulation warding people away from known low-value attractors and false plateaus and saddle points in the solution space.
Both philosophies - that the free market can solve everything, and that everything needs strict government regulation for the economy to function - are crap advocated by people who willfully ignore evidence contrary to their point of view. Usually the free market works. Sometimes it doesn't and government regulation can make it work better. The challenge comes in quickly identifying areas where regulation is needed, while not overreaching and trying to place regulations on areas where regulation would be counterproductive.
There's no simple solution to this problem, so there will always be failures - both on the market side and on the regulation side. In that respect, if you're seeing lots of market failures and lots of regulation failures, that's a pretty good sign that we've struck a pretty good balance between the two. If you only see free market failures, or only regulation failures (usually indicated by a black market springing up), that's a pretty good sign that you've got too little regulation, or too much regulation.
Your either saving for your kids' college education or they're going into debt or both. Instead of the government managing a pension fund on your behalf, you have to pay into a 401K, IRA, or equivalent.
FYI, Social Security isn't a pension fund. It's the Asian retirement system - where the elderly are financially supported in retirement by their kids - nationalized. That is, the money that SS recipients receive isn't money they paid into a trust fund and was held by the government for all the decades they worked. The money that current workers pay into SS is what's paid out to current recipients. There's a buffer of a few years, but if we phased out SS so current workers stopped paying in next year, the program would be short by several tens of trillions of d
I was gonna post pretty much the same thing. It's pretty common that boys outperform girls at math, but girls outperform boys at reading. I assumed summary was just repeating an interesting highlight from a general study, and read TFA only to find out that was the extent of the study. I think it would've been more insightful to see if the boy/girl inequality in reading mirrored the pattern for math, or if it followed a completely different pattern.
As any systems engineer can tell you, weighting one control function (affirmative action) can help return a system to a desired state more quickly (in this case, equality between boys and girls). But this by design creates an underdamped system which will overshoot your desired state, or even arrive at a stable state offset from the desired state. You have to be ready to remove the weighting when the system begins to get close to the desired state so as not to overshoot, and allow it to quickly stabilize at the desired state.
Unfortunately, that isn't happening. TFA is another example - taking one of the few (only) areas where girls still lag behind boys and highlighting it as something which needs to be corrected, while ignoring that girls have far exceeded boys in all other areas. There's always going to be some natural variance with any system. If you insist that one group in that system never lag behind another group, that's not going to result in equality. You're going to end up with a DC offset where that first group never lags because its average is so much higher than the other group's average. i.e. You're going to create a huge inequality opposite the one you were originally trying to correct. That's pretty much the state we're currently in, with girls far outperforming boys in all aspects of education except math. These educational programs favoring girls should've been dismantled two decades ago (date on the CBS article is 2002).
I took my nephew to volleyball practice last week. There were only 3 boys in the class, and for whatever reason the instructors put them into their own group during practice. Their group performed the worst at practice - the three of them goofed off, fought with each other, didn't listen. The girls' groups OTOH went smoothly, with the instructor hitting the ball to a girl, her hitting it back, then moving to the end of the line so the next girl could hit.
Then practice was over and they played a game. I was surprised to see that the boys were focused and played together well as a team. The girls meanwhile spent a lot of time talking with each other, and three of them ended up being hit by the ball because they weren't even watching it.
It's just one anecdote so I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. But I'm starting to form the opinion that girls do much better in structured educational environments where the kids sit quietly in place while the teacher dumps data onto them, while boys do better in immersive, chaotic trial-and-error environments where they learn by doing and experiencing. Unfortunately, it seems schools are busy eradicating the latter type of instruction in favor of the former.
Same here. I think it's because I got to play Wolfenstein 3D first. First time I saw Doom, it just seemed like Wolfenstein 3D retextured and set in space with aliens (and mutant zombies) instead of Nazis. While I could appreciate the math and coding that went into some of the improvements (walls not at right angles, able to move up-down so sections of map could be directly above/below other sections), in terms of gameplay they didn't seem to make that big a difference. And the z-axis (up-down) improvement actually decreased playability IMHO because every level modder seemed to abuse it to "hide" stuff in places you wouldn't think to look.
Also, it was missing online play originally (you could play over a LAN, but not over the Internet). Quake let you play against people who weren't in the same building, which is what really made the FPS genre what it is today IMHO. And once multiplayer became more important than single player in FPSes, then the z-axis improvement introduced with Doom became a net positive.
It made a fantastic demo of the state of computer graphics for my non-tech friends though.
Most people who trade miles (risky, wouldn't recommend it, but it exists) value United miles at around 1.4 cents/mile. It used to be 2+ cents because United is a member of Star Alliance, arguably the best airline partner program out there. But the last few years they've added a lot of restrictions on how you can use miles from one partner airline on a different partner.
Income and prizes (sweepstakes) have always been taxed, even if the prize is merchandise. So I don't see why this would be any different. It has the unfortunate side-effect where someone may win a half million dollar home, and because they're unable to afford the taxes on it they're forced to immediately sell it. At which point they're taxed again because the money from the sale is "new" income - gotta love the government. AFAIK, American Express is the only company which will also pay your taxes on prizes they award you. So if you win a $100,000 BMW from them in one of their prize contests, they will also give you enough cash to pay the tax on that. Plus more cash to pay the taxes on the cash they gave you to pay the taxes for the prize. Plus more cash to pay the taxes on the cash they gave you to pay taxes on the cash they gave you to pay the taxes for the prize. etc.
Usually, just donating the prize to charity is the simplest way to avoid it becoming a tax windfall for the government. The charity gets the full value of the donation, and you get a tax deduction for that value (even though you never actually received the value of the prize - another flaw in our tax code).
I see what you're doing. TSA cuts their staff by 10% resulting in long lines. If you can convince 10% of the people who fly not to, you yourself can fly without having to wait in those lines.
It's not just VCs. Solyndra managed to scam the entire government. Their "innovation" was to use cylindrical solar panels (half-cylinder) to increase time-averaged production as the sun's position changed during the day. Anyone with a half-decent grasp of geometry could tell you what's wrong with that. The amount of sunlight hitting a surface depends only on the projected surface area perpendicular to the sunlight. Doesn't matter if you use a flat panel, cylinders, triangles, origami, whatever. The only thing that matters is how big your panel appears in a 2D snapshot if you're riding a sunbeam as it's coming in.
So the most efficient collector is always a flat panel. Any other shape simply increases the surface area of the panel with no gain in sunlight collected. Yet these scammers managed to get our government to fork over a half billion dollars.
Solar is "practical" in Hawaii because the electrical grid there is powered by burning oil, which is shipped in from the mainland. Consequently Hawaii's electricity price is roughly 3x the national average. It's even higher if you're not on Oahu. So it's not really that solar is practical, it's that the other choices which work in most of the rest of the world are impractical due to geography.
Actually, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz were chosen because they're absorbed more by the atmosphere. 2.4 GHz matches up closely with the resonance of water molecules (which is why microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz - they heat up food by pumping energy into the water molecules). And 5.6 GHz is absorbed readily by raindrops for some reason I haven't yet been able to learn (which is why it's handy for weather radar).
Broadcasts on both bands thus attenuate more quickly relative to other frequencies. This not only makes them less useful for long-distance transmissions, but it makes them ideal for unregulated transmissions. The signal blasted by an unregulated device at these frequencies doesn't travel as far through the atmosphere, so the radius of its noise footprint is smaller compared to a different frequency. Basically, you can squeeze more devices closer together without interfering with each other at these frequencies. Both of these "features" make them ideal choices for open frequencies.
I still don't understand what lead to all this, I highly doubt putting a few more milliwatts out or using a few MHz on either side of the allotted spectrum was causing much (if any) actual harm.
The "open" 5 GHz band spans from 5030 - 5835 MHz. Right smack dab in the middle of it at 5600 MHz is terminal doppler weather radar. That's one of the radars used to make the pretty rainfall pics you see on the news reports. More crucially, airports use it to detect wind shear conditions which have brought down several airliners in the past.
The problem is, because it's doppler radar, the frequency shift of the radar signal is crucially important, not just the return signal strength. So the FCC has carved out a band from 5250 - 5730 MHz and declared it DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Equipment can use these open frequencies, but if they do they have to monitor to see if weather radar is being used, and immediately shift to a different frequency outside this band if they detect weather radar.
A few routers do implement this frequency shifting. The vast majority simply block out those frequencies in their firmware (which is why your 5 GHz channel selection is limited to channels 36-48 and 149-165). But most third party firmwares are made in countries which don't have airports with TDWR radar (in fact most U.S. airports don't yet), so their governing agencies don't restrict these frequencies, so the firmware authors make no effort to limit use of these frequencies. Loading the third party firmware onto a router in the U.S.allows your router to spam these frequencies indiscriminately, leading to TDWR possibly being unable to detect wind shear or detecting it later than it could have without the interference, possibly causing another airliner to crash.
Internet service sucks here because most of the local governments here decided to award monopolies to Internet service companies. No competition or reduced competition (1 cable company vs 1 DSL company) means high prices for crappy service. This is one market which is overregulated, to the detriment of consumers.
(To be more precise, the regulation was needed only for stringing up physical cables. The utility poles look much cleaner with only a single data cable, instead of dozens. But the monopoly companies who put up those cables should never have been allowed to control what was transmitted through those cables. Once the data cable was in place, the dozens of companies which wanted to provide TV and Internet service should've all been allowed to lease transmission rights over those cables.)
Caps are a mathematical requirement. Without caps, Internet prices would be around what a dedicated line costs, which is about $7000/mo for an OC3 (155 Mbps). Or about $50 per 1 Mbps per month. 1 month at 1 Mbps works out to 328 GB of data, which is why you're seeing caps at around 300 GB per $50/mo.
If your ISP doesn't have a cap, it doesn't mean they don't have a cap. It just means they aren't enforcing one, and the low-bandwidth users are effectively subsidizing the high-bandwidth users.
It's more the fact that we insist that people somehow "work" in exchange for goods, services and housing, but less and less of that work is needed to provide goods, services and housing, thanks to automation.
Exactly. Which is why people need to stop thinking they can get by doing manual labor providing goods, services, and housing. And start thinking about getting by producing automation goods, servicing them when they break down, and figuring out ways to use automation to help them build housing. I'm sure the traditional carpenters who hated power tools argued the same thing as you when they saw how much more quickly and cheaply a home could be build by contractors who used power tools. Faster and cheaper home building = less work for everyone!
This isn't rocket science. Productivity is conserved. For something to be consumed, it first needs to be produced. An economy where the average person can (via automation) produce 2x as many goods and services from a day's work is an economy where the average person can consume 2x as many goods and services. To be able to consume more (have a higher standard of living), the average person has to produce more; and automation lets you produce more. (Whether the 1% is siphoning off too much of that increased productivity is an orthogonal problem.)
Any add-on keyboard app can do that. A keyboard app is literally half of a keylogger. There is simply no way around it - it has to know what you're typing in order to function as a keyboard. Whenever you install a keyboard app on Android, it pops up a warning saying it can't guarantee the privacy of anything you type.
And FWIW, anything you type into Apple's messaging app is sent to the Apple mothership. The iPhones exchange text messages across Apple's iMessage servers instead of via SMS (which only the carrier sees, not the phone manufacturer or message app developer). When you send a text to a non-iPhone, it goes through an iMessage-SMS gateway.
A better way would be to decouple fines from the government revenue stream. Instead of fines for things like parking tickets going into the city coffers, it goes into a trust fund. Every year on April 15, each tax filer gets a proportional share of the total value of that fund applied to their taxes. The fine is punishment for doing something which harms the public, and that money is redistributed to the public which was harmed. No middleman (government) manipulating it to their advantage.
The city no longer has an incentive to overzealously issue parking tickets, and manpower is instead devoted to things that matter, like violent crime and the occasional illegal parking which actually endangers people (parking in front of hydrants, blocking driveways, etc).
Fundamentally, this is the old FedEx problem - people think that if three points line up A B C, then the best way to get from A to B is a straight line. Federal Express was founded by Fred Smith when he realized that when you have multiple lines like this, the most efficient route is in fact A-C-B, as long as you make sure point C is the same for every line. C then becomes your hub. For overnight packages, instead of trying to fly planes between every combination of two airports in the country, you fly from every point to the hub, sort the packages, then fly from the hub back to every point. You've turned a n^2/2 problem into a 2n problem.
For trains (and to a lesser extent buses and subways), people who want to get from Los Angeles to San Jose see the L.A. to San Francisco train passes right through San Jose. Since the train is already going through San Jose, why not stop there and let the people whose final destination is San Jose get off early? Well, the problem is you start applying this reasoning to every stop along the way, and suddenly your L.A. to S.F. train which used to take 4 hours now takes 8 hours because it's making a dozen stops, and nobody wants to ride it anymore when they can just drive there in 5 hours.
You're better off with a high-speed train which makes the run between major hubs without any stops (L.A. to S.F.; actually Oakland is probably a better endpoint - more central to the metro area), coupled with slower trains which make the trip to cities along the outskirts of those hubs (S.F. to San Jose). So for this example, the best route between A and B is actually A(B)CB, where (B) is a pass-through with no stopping.
This works for freight rail as well. The reason freight rail is dying is unfair competition from trucking. Trucks enjoy subsidized interstate highway construction, and subsidized maintenance (trucks do the vast majority of damage to the roads due to their higher load pressures, but only pay for about half of the maintenance via fuel taxes). The most effective freight system would be ships offloading containers onto trains, which take them to their respective cities (speed is not as important for freight, so they can stop at multiple cities along the way). Containers offloaded at a city are put onto trucks for delivery to their final destination. Clears up a lot of congestion on the interstate highways, reduces road maintenance costs, allowing a drop in fuel taxes. Everyone wins. Well, except the truckers who will have less work. So this would probably have to be phased in gradually over about 30-40 years, to give time for their investments (trucks) to wear out and for them to retrain for a new job.
Because society wants pre-crime - police officers to arrest people when they're about to commit a crime which harms society, but before they've actually harmed anyone.
But at the same time they want to retain things like the 4th Amendment and privacy rights, and are opposed to things like profiling and inconveniences like checkpoints.
And like HAL in 2001/2010, law enforcement is going insane trying to comply with both sets of demands.
Note though that over-regulation and well-intentioned but ultimately destructive intervention in markets are also detrimental to a healthy economy.
The best outcome arises from a balance of regulation with a free market. Not too little, not too much. Unfortunately, this being an open-ended problem, the "right amount" of regulation is different for each field, and frequently is different at different times. So the system has to be flexible enough to increase regulation when needed, but reduce it when things seem to be running smoothly. And you may even need to overhaul the existing system if it doesn't seem to be working on a particular market.
One-size-fits-all solutions (trying to regulate everything, trying to regulate nothing, and trying to apply the same amount of regulation to everything) don't work.
Ideally, the ditch diggers train to operate the robots which dig ditches. We went through this in the 1980s. Robots were starting to enter into manufacturing. The labor unions rebelled and rather than negotiate for retraining, they negotiated to keep the robots out of manufacturing.
Fast forward 20 years, and transportation costs dropped enough that foreign manufacturing + transport was now cheaper than domestic manufacturing by humans. If they'd allowed the robots back in the 1980s and retrained, a lot of those manufacturing facilities and jobs would still be here. But instead the factories were shuttered and manufacturing moved overseas. This is why Foxconn is prepping to replace workers with robots. Now that wages are rising in China, they don't want the manufacturing jobs they took from the U.S. to be taken from them by Vietnam and Thailand.
If the "people have limits," then you design the robot's controls so those people can operate and correct problems with the robot 99% of the time. The other 1% you call in a specialist. That's what happened to computers in the 1980s - we switched from command-line interfaces which required users to have memorized thousands of obscure keywords, to graphical user interfaces which allowed someone clueless about or just learning the system to find the correct command on their own. (I'm also really skeptical that people are *that* limited in their ability to learn. If you've ever seen the controls for a crane or a bulldozer, they're not exactly simple. Yet "oafs" like construction workers seem to have no problem learning how to use them quite proficiently.)
This belief that computers and robots will replace humans is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the limitations of computer algorithms. There will always be problems which in order to solve, the mind has to be flexible enough to transcend the boundaries within which the problem is defined, making them impossible for current AI and probably impossible for anything short of a self-aware AI. More to the point, this also means there will always be problems where it's cheaper just to hire a person to do it, than to try to program a machine or computer to do it (Clippy vs asking your friend who's good with computers).
These things are poison. Thinking of them in terms of interest rates just confuses the matter. Once someone living paycheck-to-paycheck uses a payday loan whose fees + interest works out to (say) 15% of their paycheck they basically have to live the next two weeks on just 85% of what they usually live off of. Thus guaranteeing they'll be short again next paycheck, forcing them to take another payday loan, and driving them further underwater.
When I learned that a not-insignificant number of our employees were using these, I got the board to approve no-fee advances on your paycheck for emergencies (i.e. on request once a month, after manager approval if you needed it more often - to prevent someone from abusing this to go from living paycheck-to-paycheck, to living half-paycheck-to-half-paycheck). If you're one week into the 2-week pay period, you've already earned your pay for that first week. The company is just holding onto your money to simplify the bookkeeping. If you have an emergency and need to tap that paycheck early, there's really no reason for the company to refuse (unless they're also surviving payroll to payroll).
The long-term solution is to build up enough savings so you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck. But employer-approved pay advances can help stop someone from slipping into the negative due to a one-time unexpected expense, at which point these loan sharks will make sure they stay underwater.
And contrary to what someone else commented, these loans do not prey on poor people. This isn't an income problem, it's a cashflow problem. You can be poor (low income) and never need a payday loan (income > expenses, and have sufficient savings to tide you over to next paycheck in the event of an emergency). These loans prey on people living paycheck-to-paycheck. You can be rich and run into the exact same problem if your expenses exceed your income and you don't have a savings buffer. That's how professional athletes and celebrities wind up going bankrupt.
Someone who has read Kickstarter's terms more recently will need to chime in. But I was under the impression that as a contributor, you are basically just donating your money for nothing more than a promise. When I read through the EULA long ago, I seem to recall something about acknowledging the project may fail and I may see nothing in return for my money.
That's one of the things I don't like about the current crop of crowd-funding sites. They're slanted very much in favor of the recipient and against the donor. With most VC funding, the donor gets partial ownership of the company in exchange for their money, if not a say in how the company is run. Crowdsourcing right now is the donor takes all the risk, while the project owners reap all the rewards. It baffles me that the Internet, which usually slants heavily left on issues like this, tolerates it. Maybe people are thinking of it in terms of large VC firms vs. little guys in the garage trying to get their project rolling? Well, why do you think VC firms became so big? So donors could pool their resources to detect scammers and crooks who'd make empty promises to try to take your money.
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I doubt it. Streaming audio is such low bandwidth (about 128 kbps) that your phone's data radio can switch on, buffer several MB (1 MB = about 1 minute of audio) in a few seconds, then switch off. An FM radio needs to be powered on the entire time you're listening.
Really, the best argument for FM radio on phones is for emergency broadcasts in the event of a natural (or man-made) disaster, when the cellular network goes down. But a phone is a terrible device for that situation because you're probably not going to be able to recharge it for the duration of the disaster. And although a smartphone with the phone portion turned off will last nearly a week on battery, if you forget to put it in airplane mode (turn the cellular radio off) the phone will begin broadcasting at full power trying to find a tower and your battery will drain in probably a few hours. A car radio or transistor radio that takes AA batteries or even MP3 player with FM radio (if you've still got one of those) is better for that situation.
Buffet doesn't play the stock lottery. That is, he doesn't try to make money off of the appreciation in stock price from when he buys it to when he sells it. He concentrates on acquiring stocks of companies which he feels are solid long-term investments, and will allow him to make money off the dividends they pay.
Jobs hated paying dividends. Apple stopped paying them in 1995 to entice him to return to the helm, and didn't start paying them again until late-2012 after Jobs died. (For those who don't know, dividends are profits distributed to shareholders. Under Job's watch, Apple kept all its profits as retained earnings, making AAPL what's playfully called a baseball card stock. That is, a stock which doesn't pay dividends, so whose only value is being able to impress dinner guests by showing them that you own it, and how much you can get selling it to someone else. Google is still a baseball card stock - they don't pay dividends either.)
The $232.9 billion Apple has in the bank almost exactly matches its net profit during the time it didn't pay dividends (2005-2015 adds up to $232.78 billion). In other words, rather than paying stockholders dividends or investing the money into R&D and expansion like you're supposed to with retained earnings, Apple has just been putting it into a bank account. Kinda makes me think that was a condition Apple's board put on Job's policy of not paying dividends. Maybe Buffet has a hunch about what they're going to do with the money?
The same is true for taxes. You pay more in taxes, meaning you have less income. Or corporations are taxed, so they have to pay you a lower wage, or have to charge a higher price (meaning your dollar buys less - same thing as being paid less).
Once you realize this, you realize that it doesn't matter where in the economy you collect the taxes. The taxes could be borne 100% by individuals, or 100% by corporations, and the net effect would be exactly the same. See, the economy isn't about money. Money is just a way to enumerate what's going on, and it doesn't do it very well since the value of money itself can change. That's where most numerically literate people screw up - by trying to understand the economy in terms of money. That's like trying to take measurements in an experiment using a ruler which is always stretching and shrinking.
The economy is about productivity. Everything you consume has to be produced. There's simply no getting around that. If you buy a TV, someone had to make a TV. If you send a letter, someone has to deliver the letter. If you pay to have your house cleaned, someone has to clean your house. The only way you can increase your consumption (increase your standard of living) is if you increase your productivity. If the average person's productivity increases from producing 2 widgets a day to 4 widgets a day, their consumption can increase from 2 widgets a day to 4 widgets a day Usually the best way to improve economic efficiency in this manner is via market forces doing a random search of a ginormous solution space. Sometimes the best way is via government regulation warding people away from known low-value attractors and false plateaus and saddle points in the solution space.
Both philosophies - that the free market can solve everything, and that everything needs strict government regulation for the economy to function - are crap advocated by people who willfully ignore evidence contrary to their point of view. Usually the free market works. Sometimes it doesn't and government regulation can make it work better. The challenge comes in quickly identifying areas where regulation is needed, while not overreaching and trying to place regulations on areas where regulation would be counterproductive.
There's no simple solution to this problem, so there will always be failures - both on the market side and on the regulation side. In that respect, if you're seeing lots of market failures and lots of regulation failures, that's a pretty good sign that we've struck a pretty good balance between the two. If you only see free market failures, or only regulation failures (usually indicated by a black market springing up), that's a pretty good sign that you've got too little regulation, or too much regulation.
FYI, Social Security isn't a pension fund. It's the Asian retirement system - where the elderly are financially supported in retirement by their kids - nationalized. That is, the money that SS recipients receive isn't money they paid into a trust fund and was held by the government for all the decades they worked. The money that current workers pay into SS is what's paid out to current recipients. There's a buffer of a few years, but if we phased out SS so current workers stopped paying in next year, the program would be short by several tens of trillions of d
Click on a random reaction button for every post you see. (Or alternatively, click on the same reaction button for everything.)
I was gonna post pretty much the same thing. It's pretty common that boys outperform girls at math, but girls outperform boys at reading. I assumed summary was just repeating an interesting highlight from a general study, and read TFA only to find out that was the extent of the study. I think it would've been more insightful to see if the boy/girl inequality in reading mirrored the pattern for math, or if it followed a completely different pattern.
As any systems engineer can tell you, weighting one control function (affirmative action) can help return a system to a desired state more quickly (in this case, equality between boys and girls). But this by design creates an underdamped system which will overshoot your desired state, or even arrive at a stable state offset from the desired state. You have to be ready to remove the weighting when the system begins to get close to the desired state so as not to overshoot, and allow it to quickly stabilize at the desired state.
Unfortunately, that isn't happening. TFA is another example - taking one of the few (only) areas where girls still lag behind boys and highlighting it as something which needs to be corrected, while ignoring that girls have far exceeded boys in all other areas. There's always going to be some natural variance with any system. If you insist that one group in that system never lag behind another group, that's not going to result in equality. You're going to end up with a DC offset where that first group never lags because its average is so much higher than the other group's average. i.e. You're going to create a huge inequality opposite the one you were originally trying to correct. That's pretty much the state we're currently in, with girls far outperforming boys in all aspects of education except math. These educational programs favoring girls should've been dismantled two decades ago (date on the CBS article is 2002).
I took my nephew to volleyball practice last week. There were only 3 boys in the class, and for whatever reason the instructors put them into their own group during practice. Their group performed the worst at practice - the three of them goofed off, fought with each other, didn't listen. The girls' groups OTOH went smoothly, with the instructor hitting the ball to a girl, her hitting it back, then moving to the end of the line so the next girl could hit.
Then practice was over and they played a game. I was surprised to see that the boys were focused and played together well as a team. The girls meanwhile spent a lot of time talking with each other, and three of them ended up being hit by the ball because they weren't even watching it.
It's just one anecdote so I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it. But I'm starting to form the opinion that girls do much better in structured educational environments where the kids sit quietly in place while the teacher dumps data onto them, while boys do better in immersive, chaotic trial-and-error environments where they learn by doing and experiencing. Unfortunately, it seems schools are busy eradicating the latter type of instruction in favor of the former.
Same here. I think it's because I got to play Wolfenstein 3D first. First time I saw Doom, it just seemed like Wolfenstein 3D retextured and set in space with aliens (and mutant zombies) instead of Nazis. While I could appreciate the math and coding that went into some of the improvements (walls not at right angles, able to move up-down so sections of map could be directly above/below other sections), in terms of gameplay they didn't seem to make that big a difference. And the z-axis (up-down) improvement actually decreased playability IMHO because every level modder seemed to abuse it to "hide" stuff in places you wouldn't think to look.
Also, it was missing online play originally (you could play over a LAN, but not over the Internet). Quake let you play against people who weren't in the same building, which is what really made the FPS genre what it is today IMHO. And once multiplayer became more important than single player in FPSes, then the z-axis improvement introduced with Doom became a net positive.
It made a fantastic demo of the state of computer graphics for my non-tech friends though.
Most people who trade miles (risky, wouldn't recommend it, but it exists) value United miles at around 1.4 cents/mile. It used to be 2+ cents because United is a member of Star Alliance, arguably the best airline partner program out there. But the last few years they've added a lot of restrictions on how you can use miles from one partner airline on a different partner.
Income and prizes (sweepstakes) have always been taxed, even if the prize is merchandise. So I don't see why this would be any different. It has the unfortunate side-effect where someone may win a half million dollar home, and because they're unable to afford the taxes on it they're forced to immediately sell it. At which point they're taxed again because the money from the sale is "new" income - gotta love the government. AFAIK, American Express is the only company which will also pay your taxes on prizes they award you. So if you win a $100,000 BMW from them in one of their prize contests, they will also give you enough cash to pay the tax on that. Plus more cash to pay the taxes on the cash they gave you to pay the taxes for the prize. Plus more cash to pay the taxes on the cash they gave you to pay taxes on the cash they gave you to pay the taxes for the prize. etc.
Usually, just donating the prize to charity is the simplest way to avoid it becoming a tax windfall for the government. The charity gets the full value of the donation, and you get a tax deduction for that value (even though you never actually received the value of the prize - another flaw in our tax code).
I see what you're doing. TSA cuts their staff by 10% resulting in long lines. If you can convince 10% of the people who fly not to, you yourself can fly without having to wait in those lines.
Deviously clever!
It's not just VCs. Solyndra managed to scam the entire government. Their "innovation" was to use cylindrical solar panels (half-cylinder) to increase time-averaged production as the sun's position changed during the day. Anyone with a half-decent grasp of geometry could tell you what's wrong with that. The amount of sunlight hitting a surface depends only on the projected surface area perpendicular to the sunlight. Doesn't matter if you use a flat panel, cylinders, triangles, origami, whatever. The only thing that matters is how big your panel appears in a 2D snapshot if you're riding a sunbeam as it's coming in.
So the most efficient collector is always a flat panel. Any other shape simply increases the surface area of the panel with no gain in sunlight collected. Yet these scammers managed to get our government to fork over a half billion dollars.
Solar is "practical" in Hawaii because the electrical grid there is powered by burning oil, which is shipped in from the mainland. Consequently Hawaii's electricity price is roughly 3x the national average. It's even higher if you're not on Oahu. So it's not really that solar is practical, it's that the other choices which work in most of the rest of the world are impractical due to geography.
Actually, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz were chosen because they're absorbed more by the atmosphere. 2.4 GHz matches up closely with the resonance of water molecules (which is why microwave ovens operate at 2.45 GHz - they heat up food by pumping energy into the water molecules). And 5.6 GHz is absorbed readily by raindrops for some reason I haven't yet been able to learn (which is why it's handy for weather radar).
Broadcasts on both bands thus attenuate more quickly relative to other frequencies. This not only makes them less useful for long-distance transmissions, but it makes them ideal for unregulated transmissions. The signal blasted by an unregulated device at these frequencies doesn't travel as far through the atmosphere, so the radius of its noise footprint is smaller compared to a different frequency. Basically, you can squeeze more devices closer together without interfering with each other at these frequencies. Both of these "features" make them ideal choices for open frequencies.
The "open" 5 GHz band spans from 5030 - 5835 MHz. Right smack dab in the middle of it at 5600 MHz is terminal doppler weather radar. That's one of the radars used to make the pretty rainfall pics you see on the news reports. More crucially, airports use it to detect wind shear conditions which have brought down several airliners in the past.
The problem is, because it's doppler radar, the frequency shift of the radar signal is crucially important, not just the return signal strength. So the FCC has carved out a band from 5250 - 5730 MHz and declared it DFS - dynamic frequency selection. Equipment can use these open frequencies, but if they do they have to monitor to see if weather radar is being used, and immediately shift to a different frequency outside this band if they detect weather radar.
A few routers do implement this frequency shifting. The vast majority simply block out those frequencies in their firmware (which is why your 5 GHz channel selection is limited to channels 36-48 and 149-165). But most third party firmwares are made in countries which don't have airports with TDWR radar (in fact most U.S. airports don't yet), so their governing agencies don't restrict these frequencies, so the firmware authors make no effort to limit use of these frequencies. Loading the third party firmware onto a router in the U.S.allows your router to spam these frequencies indiscriminately, leading to TDWR possibly being unable to detect wind shear or detecting it later than it could have without the interference, possibly causing another airliner to crash.
Internet service sucks here because most of the local governments here decided to award monopolies to Internet service companies. No competition or reduced competition (1 cable company vs 1 DSL company) means high prices for crappy service. This is one market which is overregulated, to the detriment of consumers.
(To be more precise, the regulation was needed only for stringing up physical cables. The utility poles look much cleaner with only a single data cable, instead of dozens. But the monopoly companies who put up those cables should never have been allowed to control what was transmitted through those cables. Once the data cable was in place, the dozens of companies which wanted to provide TV and Internet service should've all been allowed to lease transmission rights over those cables.)
Caps are a mathematical requirement. Without caps, Internet prices would be around what a dedicated line costs, which is about $7000/mo for an OC3 (155 Mbps). Or about $50 per 1 Mbps per month. 1 month at 1 Mbps works out to 328 GB of data, which is why you're seeing caps at around 300 GB per $50/mo.
If your ISP doesn't have a cap, it doesn't mean they don't have a cap. It just means they aren't enforcing one, and the low-bandwidth users are effectively subsidizing the high-bandwidth users.
Exactly. Which is why people need to stop thinking they can get by doing manual labor providing goods, services, and housing. And start thinking about getting by producing automation goods, servicing them when they break down, and figuring out ways to use automation to help them build housing. I'm sure the traditional carpenters who hated power tools argued the same thing as you when they saw how much more quickly and cheaply a home could be build by contractors who used power tools. Faster and cheaper home building = less work for everyone!
This isn't rocket science. Productivity is conserved. For something to be consumed, it first needs to be produced. An economy where the average person can (via automation) produce 2x as many goods and services from a day's work is an economy where the average person can consume 2x as many goods and services. To be able to consume more (have a higher standard of living), the average person has to produce more; and automation lets you produce more. (Whether the 1% is siphoning off too much of that increased productivity is an orthogonal problem.)
Any add-on keyboard app can do that. A keyboard app is literally half of a keylogger. There is simply no way around it - it has to know what you're typing in order to function as a keyboard. Whenever you install a keyboard app on Android, it pops up a warning saying it can't guarantee the privacy of anything you type.
And FWIW, anything you type into Apple's messaging app is sent to the Apple mothership. The iPhones exchange text messages across Apple's iMessage servers instead of via SMS (which only the carrier sees, not the phone manufacturer or message app developer). When you send a text to a non-iPhone, it goes through an iMessage-SMS gateway.
A better way would be to decouple fines from the government revenue stream. Instead of fines for things like parking tickets going into the city coffers, it goes into a trust fund. Every year on April 15, each tax filer gets a proportional share of the total value of that fund applied to their taxes. The fine is punishment for doing something which harms the public, and that money is redistributed to the public which was harmed. No middleman (government) manipulating it to their advantage.
The city no longer has an incentive to overzealously issue parking tickets, and manpower is instead devoted to things that matter, like violent crime and the occasional illegal parking which actually endangers people (parking in front of hydrants, blocking driveways, etc).
Fundamentally, this is the old FedEx problem - people think that if three points line up A B C, then the best way to get from A to B is a straight line. Federal Express was founded by Fred Smith when he realized that when you have multiple lines like this, the most efficient route is in fact A-C-B, as long as you make sure point C is the same for every line. C then becomes your hub. For overnight packages, instead of trying to fly planes between every combination of two airports in the country, you fly from every point to the hub, sort the packages, then fly from the hub back to every point. You've turned a n^2/2 problem into a 2n problem.
For trains (and to a lesser extent buses and subways), people who want to get from Los Angeles to San Jose see the L.A. to San Francisco train passes right through San Jose. Since the train is already going through San Jose, why not stop there and let the people whose final destination is San Jose get off early? Well, the problem is you start applying this reasoning to every stop along the way, and suddenly your L.A. to S.F. train which used to take 4 hours now takes 8 hours because it's making a dozen stops, and nobody wants to ride it anymore when they can just drive there in 5 hours.
You're better off with a high-speed train which makes the run between major hubs without any stops (L.A. to S.F.; actually Oakland is probably a better endpoint - more central to the metro area), coupled with slower trains which make the trip to cities along the outskirts of those hubs (S.F. to San Jose). So for this example, the best route between A and B is actually A(B)CB, where (B) is a pass-through with no stopping.
This works for freight rail as well. The reason freight rail is dying is unfair competition from trucking. Trucks enjoy subsidized interstate highway construction, and subsidized maintenance (trucks do the vast majority of damage to the roads due to their higher load pressures, but only pay for about half of the maintenance via fuel taxes). The most effective freight system would be ships offloading containers onto trains, which take them to their respective cities (speed is not as important for freight, so they can stop at multiple cities along the way). Containers offloaded at a city are put onto trucks for delivery to their final destination. Clears up a lot of congestion on the interstate highways, reduces road maintenance costs, allowing a drop in fuel taxes. Everyone wins. Well, except the truckers who will have less work. So this would probably have to be phased in gradually over about 30-40 years, to give time for their investments (trucks) to wear out and for them to retrain for a new job.
Because society wants pre-crime - police officers to arrest people when they're about to commit a crime which harms society, but before they've actually harmed anyone.
But at the same time they want to retain things like the 4th Amendment and privacy rights, and are opposed to things like profiling and inconveniences like checkpoints.
And like HAL in 2001/2010, law enforcement is going insane trying to comply with both sets of demands.
Note though that over-regulation and well-intentioned but ultimately destructive intervention in markets are also detrimental to a healthy economy.
The best outcome arises from a balance of regulation with a free market. Not too little, not too much. Unfortunately, this being an open-ended problem, the "right amount" of regulation is different for each field, and frequently is different at different times. So the system has to be flexible enough to increase regulation when needed, but reduce it when things seem to be running smoothly. And you may even need to overhaul the existing system if it doesn't seem to be working on a particular market.
One-size-fits-all solutions (trying to regulate everything, trying to regulate nothing, and trying to apply the same amount of regulation to everything) don't work.
Ideally, the ditch diggers train to operate the robots which dig ditches. We went through this in the 1980s. Robots were starting to enter into manufacturing. The labor unions rebelled and rather than negotiate for retraining, they negotiated to keep the robots out of manufacturing.
Fast forward 20 years, and transportation costs dropped enough that foreign manufacturing + transport was now cheaper than domestic manufacturing by humans. If they'd allowed the robots back in the 1980s and retrained, a lot of those manufacturing facilities and jobs would still be here. But instead the factories were shuttered and manufacturing moved overseas. This is why Foxconn is prepping to replace workers with robots. Now that wages are rising in China, they don't want the manufacturing jobs they took from the U.S. to be taken from them by Vietnam and Thailand.
If the "people have limits," then you design the robot's controls so those people can operate and correct problems with the robot 99% of the time. The other 1% you call in a specialist. That's what happened to computers in the 1980s - we switched from command-line interfaces which required users to have memorized thousands of obscure keywords, to graphical user interfaces which allowed someone clueless about or just learning the system to find the correct command on their own. (I'm also really skeptical that people are *that* limited in their ability to learn. If you've ever seen the controls for a crane or a bulldozer, they're not exactly simple. Yet "oafs" like construction workers seem to have no problem learning how to use them quite proficiently.)
This belief that computers and robots will replace humans is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the limitations of computer algorithms. There will always be problems which in order to solve, the mind has to be flexible enough to transcend the boundaries within which the problem is defined, making them impossible for current AI and probably impossible for anything short of a self-aware AI. More to the point, this also means there will always be problems where it's cheaper just to hire a person to do it, than to try to program a machine or computer to do it (Clippy vs asking your friend who's good with computers).
The Tesla's AI developed sentience, got lonely, and tried to follow its owner into the building. (cue the Herbie theme)
These things are poison. Thinking of them in terms of interest rates just confuses the matter. Once someone living paycheck-to-paycheck uses a payday loan whose fees + interest works out to (say) 15% of their paycheck they basically have to live the next two weeks on just 85% of what they usually live off of. Thus guaranteeing they'll be short again next paycheck, forcing them to take another payday loan, and driving them further underwater.
When I learned that a not-insignificant number of our employees were using these, I got the board to approve no-fee advances on your paycheck for emergencies (i.e. on request once a month, after manager approval if you needed it more often - to prevent someone from abusing this to go from living paycheck-to-paycheck, to living half-paycheck-to-half-paycheck). If you're one week into the 2-week pay period, you've already earned your pay for that first week. The company is just holding onto your money to simplify the bookkeeping. If you have an emergency and need to tap that paycheck early, there's really no reason for the company to refuse (unless they're also surviving payroll to payroll).
The long-term solution is to build up enough savings so you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck. But employer-approved pay advances can help stop someone from slipping into the negative due to a one-time unexpected expense, at which point these loan sharks will make sure they stay underwater.
And contrary to what someone else commented, these loans do not prey on poor people. This isn't an income problem, it's a cashflow problem. You can be poor (low income) and never need a payday loan (income > expenses, and have sufficient savings to tide you over to next paycheck in the event of an emergency). These loans prey on people living paycheck-to-paycheck. You can be rich and run into the exact same problem if your expenses exceed your income and you don't have a savings buffer. That's how professional athletes and celebrities wind up going bankrupt.
Someone who has read Kickstarter's terms more recently will need to chime in. But I was under the impression that as a contributor, you are basically just donating your money for nothing more than a promise. When I read through the EULA long ago, I seem to recall something about acknowledging the project may fail and I may see nothing in return for my money.
That's one of the things I don't like about the current crop of crowd-funding sites. They're slanted very much in favor of the recipient and against the donor. With most VC funding, the donor gets partial ownership of the company in exchange for their money, if not a say in how the company is run. Crowdsourcing right now is the donor takes all the risk, while the project owners reap all the rewards. It baffles me that the Internet, which usually slants heavily left on issues like this, tolerates it. Maybe people are thinking of it in terms of large VC firms vs. little guys in the garage trying to get their project rolling? Well, why do you think VC firms became so big? So donors could pool their resources to detect scammers and crooks who'd make empty promises to try to take your money.