that's how you make something cost infinitely more than it would if you just bought it outright.
Buying a car costs you an infinite sum as well. Because a car doesn't last forever, you will always be replacing it every n years. And since you're multiplying a fixed monthly fee by an infinite amount of time to claim an infinite cost, likewise paying $x to buy a new car every n years for an infinite amount of time will have infinite cost.
The subscription model does not have to be bad. There are certain advantages to it. Fixed recurring costs are what's allowed it to succeed in the ISP market - it makes both the ISP's and customer's finances more predictable. You don't have to save up money for a down payment. You can get a wider selection and/or get to switch choices more frequently - why Netflix is successful vs having to buy every DVD or Blu-ray you watch.
Your assertion is a large part of what's keeping people away from EVs. 95% of people's car use is for daily commuting which is easily within range of most existing EVs. The long trips which cover the other 5% could easily be accomplished by renting a ICE car just for those infrequent trips. But because people think it's "free" to use a car they've bought, while renting a car costs money, they refuse to do this.
People need to understand that although subscribing to or renting a car costs you $x each month, so does buying a car. Just take the purchase price, subtract the final sale price, add the interest your down payment would've earned if you'd kept it, and divide by the number of months you will own the car. That's your monthly cost for owning a car.
It's not spending per se which got them into trouble. It was being on the Euro, and spending more than their citizens' productivity (valued in Euros) which got them into trouble.
There's an overwhelming tendency to analyze finances on the national level in terms of a currency. You can't do that because a currency's value isn't fixed (in fact it needs to be free-floating or you can seriously screw up your economy). You have to analyze them in terms of the true fundamental currency - productivity.
Greece (and Greek companies) was paying its citizens more in Euros than they were actually producing. If they'd done this while on the Drachma, it wouldn't have been a problem. The value of the Drachma would've simply declined relative to other currencies until their pay matched their productivity. Every Greek would've effectively gotten a pay cut, but wouldn't have really noticed because domestic prices would've dropped by the exact same amount (only prices for imported goods would've gone up). But they were on the Euro, which basically shifted their debt burden over to the other EU countries. Greeks were overpaid, the value of the Euro went down in response, causing other EU citizens to lose value in their money (to cover for Greek debt).
Short of kicking Greece out of the Euro and forcing them to return to the Drachma, the only solutions were to (1) reduce their pay (in Euros) until it matched their actual productivity, and (2) increase their productivity to help it match their pay without having to cut their pay so much. Austerity did (1). The banking and other reforms did (2). (And for those arguing for debt forgiveness: wiping out the debt without addressing (1) and (2) would've done nothing. Until the pay vs productivity imbalance was equalized, they'd have continued amassing more debt. They were basically writing IOUs to other Euro users while they siphoned off the currency's value.)
A free-floating currency will automatically try to correct for imbalances like this. It's just how the math works. And it's why a basic income (or minimum wage) doesn't work if a substantial number of people slack off (don't generate as much productivity as they're being paid). The value of the currency itself will decrease in response. The wages of the actually productive people will increase to compensate, the net effect being to decrease the purchasing power of the basic income or minimum wage. The value of the currency and the purchasing power of the basic income or minimum wage will try to stabilize at values where the income of the productive worker and the income of the basic income / minimum wage recipient are both proportional to their real productivity.
(And before all you minimum wage supporters start furiously typing a reply - I support a minimum wage. Certain market forces can cause wages to drop significantly below the actual productivity generated by the worker. A minimum wage helps correct for that. I am just pointing out the folly in trying to turn a minimum wage into a living wage. That will only work if everything people could do for pay generates enough productivity to live off of. If there's any job whose productivity isn't enough for a person to make a living off of, then implementing a living wage as a minimum wage will either make those jobs disappear, or will devalue your currency until your living minimum wage is no longer enough to live off of.)
Agreed about Cox. I'm on Cox with a 700 GB/mo cap. I don't come anywhere close to using that much. The one month I broke 600 GB/mo was right after i finished setting up my Plex server and downloaded a metric ton of anime. And the only reason I know I used that much is because I was worried about the data cap so looked it up. And that's when I learned that Cox doesn't cut you off if you exceed your cap (they don't even have a policy for sending you a warning - they just say they may do something about it in the future).
It seems when they start charging money for it, they just can't help but get greedy and stupid.
You and I are fortunate that Cox is playing good cable company. Caps and prices are screwed up at the other cable companies because the local governments have eliminated competition by awarding cable monopolies. If there were competition, a cable company implementing unreasonable caps or prices would put themselves out of business by causing their customers to flee to a competitor..
I don't expect those who didn't live through it to understand - your perception of the times is entirely skewed by people with an agenda twisting historical events to fit their political beliefs. So let me give you an apolitical history.
The 1970s were most shaped by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The sudden rise in oil prices sent a financial shock which sent our economy reeling almost into depression. This combined with Nixon's wage and price controls in 1971 led to stagflation - a combination of a stagnant economy and inflation. Normally, inflation picks up when the economy is vibrant, and decreases (is actually in danger of crossing over into deflation) when the economy is bad. But in the 1970s we suffered a bad economy with high inflation. According to Keynesian economic theory, that shouldn't be possible. But it was real, and those of us alive at the time had to deal with it.
Fed chair Paul Vocker (Carter appointee, who impressed Reagan enough he kept him on) had a theory that stagflation could be fought with high interest rates, which is exactly what he did. Under his policies, The U.S. Prime Rate peaked at 21.5% in Dec 1980. Look through that history and you'll see two peaks. The 1974 peak where interest rates were trying to keep pace with inflation, and Paul Volcker's peak in the 1980s to try to deal with stagflation. Interest rates didn't return to "normal" (around 5%-7%) until the 2000s.
Whether his theory worked or stagflation disappeared on its own is irrelevant. What's important is that we eventually escaped stagflation. Inflation came down and the economy began picking up again. But it was a miserable time for us all to be living in. High unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates. You can see the U.S. suicide rate spiking immediately after the Arab oil embargo, then staying high for a sustained period through the 1980s due to the high inflation and high interest rates (basically meant trying to save money was a lost cause).
That's why the suicide rate back then was so high. Wasn't the Democrats or the Republicans or Carter or Reagan who was at fault. It was the stupid oil embargo and the weird economic corner case we somehow found ourselves in. (TFA is also sensationalist. Suicide rate was at an all-time low around 2000. So it's not that suicide rates are "surging", they're just returning to normal levels. If you're going to study an anomalous suicide rate, study why the suicide rate hit that all-time low. Don't try to characterize what's happening now as some unexpected spike.)
It gets worse. The problem with all the basic income, living minimum wage, and most welfare proposals I've seen is that the person who thought it up doesn't understand why a dollar is worth a dollar. They assume a dollar's value will remain the same after their proposal is implemented.
U.S. GDP is about $17 trillion. Total tax revenue is about 33% of that, or just under $5.6 trillion. So far so good.
What is GDP? It's gross domestic productivity. In order to generate GDP, people have to do productive things. If you implement a basic income and 90% of people decide to become pot heads and video game bums, well now your GDP is about 10% what it originally was. So your $17 trillion GDP has shrunk to $1.7 trillion. And it is impossible to reach the $5.6 trillion tax revenue needed to cover basic income even at a 100% tax rate.
See, the value of money comes from productivity. When people stop being productive, money becomes worth less. Prices rise to balance out this drop in productivity, and now your basic income isn't enough to live on anymore. If you panic and try to freeze prices because you believe the price increases are due to sellers gouging instead of your own bumbling economic policies, you're effectively forcing sellers to sell their goods at a loss, and you break the economy. The sellers end up selling their goods on the black market instead, and now not only have you broken your economy, you've broken your currency as well.
Money is just a representation of productivity so its value is not fixed, and it's folly to make economic policies under the assumption that $3 will continue to buy a gallon of milk (with a small constant allowance for inflation). The true fundamental currency is productivity. The average standard of living of a country = sum(every person's productivity) / (number of people). If people stop doing productive work, the numerator in that equation starts to decrease, and the average standard of living drops. And (assuming people's income and the money supply stays the same) the amount of milk (productivity) you can buy for $3 decreases.
For example: Imagine a vastly simplified economy of 100 people where the only good produced and consumed is milk. Average income is $30k/yr and each person on average produces 10,000 gallons of milk. Total productivity for this country is thus 1 million gallons of milk/yr, and total income is $3 million/yr.. The price of milk is thus $3/gal. And each person buys (consumes) 10,000 gallons of milk/yr.
You decide each person needs a minimum 5,000 gallons/yr of milk to live, so you implement a basic income of $15k/yr. 90 of the people become bums. Total income drops to 90*$15k + 10*$30k = $1.65 million/yr. Total milk production drops to 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $16.50/gal - enough for your basic income to buy only 909 gallons/yr of milk.
If you resist the urge to break the economy by implementing price controls, milk producing companies are now making more money per gallon sold. Consequently they can pay their employees more (each employee is still producing 10,000 gallons/yr). The wage of a worker thus increases from $30k/yr to $165k/yr. Total income is now 90*$15k + 10*$165k = $3 million/yr, while milk production says at 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $30/gal, reducing the purchasing power of your basic income to 500 gallons/yr of milk
And so on. By the 10th iteration a working person's income is $975k and the basic income buys only 65 gallons/yr. By the 100th iteration a working person's income is $13.1 million, and the basic income only buys 11 gallons/yr. The series tries to equalize at a point where each person's income matches their productivity. In other words a basic income doesn't work - the value of the basic income tends towards the productivity of the people receiving it. If their average productivity is zero, the value of the basic income trends towards zero (the series is divergent). If their average productivity is 10% that of a worker, the value of the basic income tends towards 10% that of the worker. The value of a basic income (or minimum wage) doesn't stay at the value you originally assigned it.
Something seems off about this whole story. Blackwater is stuff that comes from your toilet. It is treated until it's solid waste. Greywater is stuff from other sources (sinks, bathtubs, showers, storm drains). It's treated, but not to the extent of blackwater.
Due to the risk of human pathogens in blackwater, only treated graywater is allowed to be used for irrigation. TFA says their study was conducted in Israel. Maybe they use treated blackwater for irrigation there since it's basically a desert? Or maybe the sludge from treated blackwater is being converted into fertilizer? Or maybe people pee in the shower there?
The country where something is developed first is saddled with a large installed base of the older tech. Countries which hop on the bandwagon later benefit from the experience of that trailblazer, and get the better tech right off the bat. Other examples include:
African countries lead the world in ratio of cellular vs landline phones - they just skipped landlines almost entirely.
Digital cell phones came to the U.S. last because the U.S. was first with analog cell phones - not only did U.S. companies have to build a digital cellular network, they had to transition all their analog customers to digital and dismantle the old analog network.
Japan initially led the world in HDTV technology. The government pumped billions of dollars into R&D to insure the HDTV standard would be the Japanese standard. But their tech was based on analog broadcasts. In the mid-1990s, computer technology became advanced enough to allow real-time digital decompression of a HD-resolution video signal, and the U.S. leapfrogged Japan and set all the digital HDTV standards we use today.
$1, quarter - George Washington
$2, nickel - Thomas Jefferson (though I'd probably give him a pass since he apparently loved one of them, and couldn't free them because of debt)
$50 - Ulysses S. Grant (he gets a pass for freeing them despite being in debt, and the whole kicked the South's butt in the Civil War thing)
$100 - Benjamin Franklin
Or can we skip the made-up rationale, and just say we felt it was about time to put a black / staunch abolitionist / whatever on our money, and we liked Andrew Jackson the least so he's voted off the island? That explanation would be sufficient for most of us. (Out of curiosity, I looked it up - Martha Washington was the first woman on U.S. paper currency - 1886 $1 silver certificate.)
So for example if you have data servers in 8 countries, you encrypt and break your data up into 5 chunks. Create 3 additional parity chunks, and store one chunk in each country. To access the original data, you need to pull data from 5 of the 8 servers (the 3 parity chunks allow you to access your data even if access to your servers in up to 3 of those countries goes down).
Any individual country's government can hack, install backdoors on, or confiscate your servers in that country, and it won't help them read your data. In order to get a readable copy of your data, they need to pull the data from at least 5 of your servers in different countries, and have your decryption key. There's no need to pick a single country and hope that it is/remains neutral and friendly to your data.
Reminds me of a time back in the mid-1990s. I was helping run a server which hosted an email list. It had a 500 MB hard drive, which was wasn't huge but was fine for our purposes at the time. Someone tried to email an *uncompressed* photo (BMP instead of JPG) from a 2 MP digital camera (so about 6 MB in size) to the entire mailing list. The email server had dutifully copied the photo to the mailbox for each recipient whose mail was hosted on the server, until it ran out of disk space and crashed. It also got bounce messages from systems whose wiser admins had blocked attachments that large, which filled up the the mail admin's mailbox with multiple copies of the 6 MB photo (one per bounce - we'd configured the mail admin to get copies of all bounce messages so we could prune dead addresses from the list).
It crashed hard - I couldn't even login over the network. I had to use the console to get in and figure out what the problem was. The first few copies of the photo I deleted from people's mailboxes, postfix (or whatever email server we were using) noticed there was now space available on the drive, and immediately copied the photo to more recipients' mailboxes thus filling the disk again. I had to take a crash course on postfix to figure out how to delete an email from the send queue.
Linux is based on Unix, which attempts to isolate the user from direct access to any hardware. Remember, Unix was originally developed for the client-server environment back in the 1970s. You had one huge, expensive computer, which everyone in the company used together via their own terminal. The last thing you wanted was one person getting direct access to the hardware. The entire way Unix (and Linux) is designed, from user accounts to permissions to protection rings, is based on this philosophy of isolating and abstracting the hardware from the user.
Most consoles roll their own OS so they can have direct access to the hardware. They hearken back to the DOS days when the PC was a Personal Computer with only a single user, so of course whatever program you happen to be running at that moment should get complete control of the hardware.
Nope. After IE hit about 90% market share, Microsoft figured they'd conquered the market and killed off all competitors. So they decided they'd earned a well-deserved rest and did... nothing. They stopped all development work on IE. For about 13 months they didn't add any new features to IE - the only updates were security updates (this was around 2001-2002 if I remember). This was an eternity in web browser development at the time. When Netscape and IE were competing, they were rolling out new features semi-annually or even quarterly.
That window was what allowed Firefox to take hold. Can you imagine browsing without tabs? Firefox introduced tabs, and that feature alone made it immensely popular. FF made IE look so much like a lump of coal that FF quickly jumped to about 25% market share. By the time the EU browser choice requirement was implemented (Dec 2009), FF was already over 30% market share. Google's Chrome browser had already been steadily growing in popularity for most of that year, and FF actually decreased in market share after the EU-mandated browser choice.
So it'd be more accurate to say Microsoft blew it big time by choosing to stand still because they had a monopoly, but that only cost them about a third of their monopoly. It took another quasi-monopoly (Google search + apps) to break Microsoft's OS-browser monopoly for good. I'm not sure the EU browser choice window had any effect. IE was already on the way down at the end of 2009 when the EU mandate was implemented. And the rate at which IE declined in market share didn't change appreciably from before 1Q 2010 to after.
(That's not to say I disagree with the EU mandate. I was actually more anti-Microsoft back in those days and felt they should've been broken up into an OS company and an apps company. But the problem with government regulation in software is that it just takes too damn long, and by the time it's finally implemented the entire software landscape has already changed for other reasons.)
Also worth noting: The 1918 Spanish Flu killed more people than WWI, possibly more people than WWII. And unlike the typical flu which mostly kills young children and the elderly, most of the Spanish Flu deaths were young adults. (It caused the body's immune system to overreact, meaning people with the stronger immune system were more likely to die from it.)
40 cents/W was probably some clearance price by a warehouse trying to move old stock. Average total installed costs for PV solar (including mouting, inverter, switching equipment, labor) is around $4 per Watt. (I should note that California tends to be on the expensive side. Arizona is below $3/W installed median price.) Remember folks, marketing brochures use the lowest cost. For real-world policies and implementations, you need to use the average cost.
$4/W gets you $4000/kW. Capacity factor for fixed panels in the continental U.S. (ratio of actual generation to peak generation) is about 0.145. So the price per kW of actual production is $4000 / 0.145 = $27586 / kW.
$0.115 / kWh is the average retail residential price for the U.S. A good chunk of that is transmission fees (installation and maintenance for all the wires, poles, transformers, etc), which is why net metering won't be coming back. If you can actually use all the electricity the PV panels generate on-site, then great! You're saving yourself a net $0.115/kWh and will pay for the panels in $27586 kW / $0.115/kWh = 239878 hours = 27.4 years. (It's lower in California because residential electricity prices are about $0.18/kWh, capacity factor for Southern California is around 0.18, which puts payback at around 14 years. And the state was giving large rebates to encourage people to get PV solar installed, dropping the net payback for the homeowner in some cases to around 7 years.)
From the standpoint of a power company though (which TFA is about), you need to compare this to the wholesale price of electricity. For coal that's about $0.03-$0.04 / kWh. So to recover $27586 / kW at a rate of $0.04 / kWh = 689650 hours, or a hair under 79 years for the U.S. India's payback time will be shorter because they're closer to the equator so their capacity factor will be higher. Levilized cost will be higher though because solar and wind costs are nearly all up-front meaning you have to take out a bigger loan than for other power sources. Other types of power costs are partly up-front, partly for fuel during the lifetime of the plant. But it's still getting close to the expected 30-50 year lifetime of a power plant.
Actually, this is more akin to the socialist way, where some central authority collects all the money and is charge of distributing it in a "fair" way. But does a really bad job at it.
The capitalist way would be for each author to sell their own work and collect money directly from the buyer, which is how the regular Amazon Kindle market works (except for the publishers monopolizing authors and trying to rig prices).
Brushing off the explanation I gave last time this came up.
The book authors (and newspapers) are under the mistaken impression the Internet is like a street. They see their books/newspapers as stores on this street. They feel Google, by indexing their publications, is putting a Google sign in front of their store - siphoning away some of their profit and brand recognition. That's why they keep trying to get Google to pay them.
The reality is that very little Internet traffic comes from hyperlinks anymore. The bulk of it comes from search engines like Google. In other words, yeah the Internet is the street. But Google provides the map (or GPS guidance if you prefer). And for people to be able to find your store, you have to give Google permission to put up a sign that says "hey, there's a store that sells this book here." If you try to force Google to pay you for this service they're providing for you, they'd rather just not pay and will take down the sign. Meaning you'll get no traffic.
Their relationship is symbiotic - Google provides them traffic, and they provide a reason for people to use Google Search. But they see their relationship as host and parasite, with Google as the parasite. That's why some publications have committed virtual suicide by telling Google not to index them. They don't understand this and think they're getting rid of a parasite, when in reality they're doing the equivalent of cutting off their own arms.
You seriously think luxury and gas guzzler taxes were the reason SUVs became popular? They became popular for two reasons:
The CAFE standards forced automakers to shrink the size of cars to meet fleet MPG requirements. Americans wanted bigger cars, so they bought the only bigger cars remaining - trucks and SUVs.
When people my generation (born in the 1960s-1970s) were growing up, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon. When we grew up, we didn't want to be like our parents so we stayed far, far away from station wagons. But the space requirements for hauling a family around were still the same. Thus SUVs became popular and the minivan was invented. Those became my generation's station wagon.
Any automaker who doesn't make something the public wants soon goes out of business. The manufacturers just build whatever will sell. Conspiracy theories that they are somehow keeping econoboxes or EVs off the market and these types of cars would be selling in droves if someone would just build them, represent a fundamental ignorance of this market reality. You're probably too young to remember, but econoboxes were popular for about a decade - right after the Arab oil embargo in 1973. It nearly destroyed the U.S. auto industry and did destroy Detroit, as they were unprepared and their models were all large gas guzzlers. Japanese car makers, which up to then were a tiny part of the market because their cars were undesirably small, were the beneficiary. They used that decade as a springboard to climb to their current market parity with American and European automakers.
Even Musk understood this reality - when he made the Tesla, he didn't jump straight to the Model 3. He started off with several premium luxury models, and used their sales to help advance the state of battery technology. Only now, 13 years later, is he ready to start building a mass-market EV (which is still priced near luxury-levels if you remove the Federal and state subsidies). There simply wasn't enough demand for them at their true market price a decade ago to make them viable.
The vast majority of plane crashes are caused by multiple factors which combine to bring the plane down. Eliminate any one of those factors and the plane never would have crashed.
You're correct that the loss of a single engine normally is not a serious problem. But increasing the chances of it happening also increases the chances it'll coincide with another problem, and the combination of the two (or three or more) will be enough to bring the plane down. So if at all possible, you avoid increasing the odds of any single problem occurring, period. Even if that single problem by itself could never bring down the plane.
A plane crashes, they investigate, find the cause, and issue advisories or mandate changes. People accuse them of being too reactive and not doing enough to prevent accidents before they happen.
They try to anticipate problems before they happen, issue advisories and make regulations. People accuse them of stirring up irrational fears.
You can't have it both ways. The FAA takes an extremely cautious approach to regulation. e.g. The computers on most new planes are 1-2 decades old. They won't allow newer technology in avionics systems because it doesn't have a long enough industrial track record to reveal any long-term problems which might crop up. So for example, those swelling capacitors which plagued home computers in the early 2000s never made it aboard planes. This overabundance of caution is because if you screw up, the resulting accident is nearly 100% fatal. Vehicle accidents start to become fatal around 40-50 mph, and by 100 mph they are almost always 100% fatal. That means nearly all plane crashes are 100% fatal.
So they don't screw around. If there's even the slightest risk of a new technology causing an accident (e.g. phones and laptops being used in-flight), you ban it for a decade or two. Study it, gauge the risks, and only after you're thoroughly convinced it's safe do you allow it. If the FAA turns out to be wrong about drones, they can shrug and say "I guess we were wrong," and all they'll have done is inconvenienced a bunch of hobbyists around airports for a decade or two. If you turn out to be wrong and drone-airliner collisions aren't safe, shrugging and saying "I guess I was wrong" won't be enough. A couple hundred people will be dead, and the people running the FAA will be hauled into Congress for an inquiry where their competence is called into question. The consequence matrix here is skewed wildly in favor of taking the overly cautious approach.
You're misconstruing Nationalism as the cause. Nationalism is a symptom. When a people feel marginalized or threatened by outsiders, it stirs up Nationalism. With the Nazis, it was the Treaty of Versailles which forced Germany to pay reparations for damages to other WWI combatants. That exacerbated the global depression in Germany, eventually leading to the Nazi party winning the plurality of votes and seats in the 1932 election. In Rawanda it was the Arusha Accords which was negotiated by multiple outside powers as a way for the majority Hutus to share power with the minority Tutsi - a group they'd formerly been at war with.
People in a country have to feel that they're deciding their own fates to accept change. When they feel their fate is being determined by outsiders somehow exerting influence or forcing conditions onto them, it will stir up nationalism. That is the true cause. Currently in the U.S., it's manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas faster than those former workers could adapt and retrain for new jobs, and the spectre of illegal immigrants being made citizens so they can vote.
As well intentioned as your social engineering project may be, and no matter how great the improved economic efficiency from offshoring, you have to make those changes at a slow enough pace so as not to make a large segment of the population feel that they're losing control of their own country. In that respect, the early stages of Nationalism are healthy - they provide a moderating force which steers the country away from such quick political change, giving people time to get used to the idea of that change and adapt. But criticizing it and demonizing it as you're doing will just radicalizes it and makes it flare up worse. Which is eventually what allows the Hitlers to come into power.
Technically, Samsung did it first on a phone with their finger hover detection (AirView). The functionality is different, but the implementation is exactly the same - all that differs is the range of sensitivity.
In response to massive avalanches caused by snowpacks becoming gigantic and eventually collapsing from their own weight, resorts and mountain towns started using explosives to deliberately cause avalanches when the snowpacks were still small. There were more avalanches, but they were smaller - not large enough to be destructive to human infrastructure.
We accidentally stumbled onto the exact same thing with earthquakes. When the oil companies started fracking, we discovered the extra lubrication could trigger small earthquakes. Unfortunately, because a huge political movement was opposed to fracking, the headlines weren't "Fracking relieves stress which would've eventually caused a bigger earthquake." They were "Fracking causes earthquakes" - implying that all the energy of the earthquake somehow came from fracking, which is pure nonsense.
And possibly the greatest tool mankind has yet discovered that could help mitigate earthquake damage was turned into a political hot potato nobody will want to touch for fear of liability. Geothermal energy - the only "clean" energy source which could potentially have replaced base load power plants - has already become a casualty of this gross ignorance of the principle of Conservation of Energy.
Voters in America recently discovered that they live under an Iranian type of system and didnâ(TM)t know it. In the primaries, voters participate in some sort of ritualistic placebo voting while party leaders select the candidates.
Remember, boys and girls, only the outcome matters.
Trump has to be stopped, by any means possible!.
The same thing is happening on the Democratic side. Clinton has a narrow lead among delegates determined by popular vote - 1289 vs 1045, or 55% vs 45%. But because of the Democrat's system of party-appointed superdelegates which are breaking for Clinton 469 vs 31, it gives the illusion of her lead being an insurmountable 1758 vs 1076, or 62% vs 38%. Essentially, the Democrat party bosses have rigged it so in any primary where the top candidates are separated by less than about 10% (which is pretty much all elections in the U.S. which are contested), they get to decide who wins, not the people. And the "lead" is exaggerated earlier when not all states have held their primaries.
Both parties are exploiting a long-standing problem with our voting system - the idea that whoever gets the most votes wins. While a truly fair voting system is impossible, it is possible to reduce the chance of outcomes contradictory to the people's general will. Our current voting system - plurality wins - is just about the worst system possible. More accurate results come about from an instant-runoff system, where the least popular choices are eliminated one at a time, until only the top two choices are pitted head to head and one of them has to get the majority of votes.
The parties reject this because such voting systems tend to elect centrist candidates (they are, after all, more representative of the entire population). Both parties are controlled by extremists, either on the far left or far right. In fact the whole primary system exists to select candidates which are centrist-to-extremist within their own party (far left or far right relative to the entire voting population), and eliminate candidates who are centrist and more representative of the entire voting population. That's why Paul and Christie were eliminated early (they're both centrist), and the RNC is working so hard to prevent Trump from winning the nomination (he's also fairly moderate, which some of his philosophies actually aligning better with the left).
If Trump doesn't win a majority of delegates, the control wielded by the Republican Party bosses will be plain for everyone to see. Whereas the control wielded by the Democrat Party bosses is masquerading as popular votes which weren't decided by popular vote.
Imagine I'm categorizing philosophies about tolerance into two groups - those which are tolerant, and those which are not. I get to "tolerance of intolerance". It's tolerating everything, so I categorize it as a tolerant philosophy.
But then someone like you argues that since it doesn't actively oppose intolerance, it's actually an intolerant philosophy. So I categorize it among the intolerant philosophies.
Now we get to your philosophy which is intolerant of "tolerance of intolerance". It does not tolerate something, so it seems like I should classify it among the intolerant philosophies. You wave your hands and explain that it's only rejecting another philosophy's intolerance, so it's really tolerance.
Someone decides they don't like your philosophy. Their philosophy is intolerance of your philosophy (which is intolerant of "tolerance of intolerance"). By your own hand-waving argument, since it's only rejecting another philosophy's intolerance (your intolerance), it too should be classified among the tolerant philosophies. And you end up with a situation where a philosophy and its polar opposite are both classified as tolerant. Contradiction.
If you're advocating a philosophy which tolerates everything, then it must in fact tolerate everything (essentially Buddhism). The moment you refuse to tolerate some things - even intolerance - your philosophy joins the countless other philosophies which are intolerant of some things. And the only question that's left then is deciding what things shouldn't you tolerate.
The same issue crops up with Democracy, or the idea that the people should be able to vote for the government they want. Should the people also be allowed to reject Democracy? If you say no, their government must remain Democratic, then it's not really Democratic since it would be denying the will of the people as determined by a popular vote if they voted to reject Democracy. Only if you allow the people to reject Democracy can a system be truly Democratic.
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Buying a car costs you an infinite sum as well. Because a car doesn't last forever, you will always be replacing it every n years. And since you're multiplying a fixed monthly fee by an infinite amount of time to claim an infinite cost, likewise paying $x to buy a new car every n years for an infinite amount of time will have infinite cost.
The subscription model does not have to be bad. There are certain advantages to it. Fixed recurring costs are what's allowed it to succeed in the ISP market - it makes both the ISP's and customer's finances more predictable. You don't have to save up money for a down payment. You can get a wider selection and/or get to switch choices more frequently - why Netflix is successful vs having to buy every DVD or Blu-ray you watch.
Your assertion is a large part of what's keeping people away from EVs. 95% of people's car use is for daily commuting which is easily within range of most existing EVs. The long trips which cover the other 5% could easily be accomplished by renting a ICE car just for those infrequent trips. But because people think it's "free" to use a car they've bought, while renting a car costs money, they refuse to do this.
People need to understand that although subscribing to or renting a car costs you $x each month, so does buying a car. Just take the purchase price, subtract the final sale price, add the interest your down payment would've earned if you'd kept it, and divide by the number of months you will own the car. That's your monthly cost for owning a car.
It's not spending per se which got them into trouble. It was being on the Euro, and spending more than their citizens' productivity (valued in Euros) which got them into trouble.
There's an overwhelming tendency to analyze finances on the national level in terms of a currency. You can't do that because a currency's value isn't fixed (in fact it needs to be free-floating or you can seriously screw up your economy). You have to analyze them in terms of the true fundamental currency - productivity.
Greece (and Greek companies) was paying its citizens more in Euros than they were actually producing. If they'd done this while on the Drachma, it wouldn't have been a problem. The value of the Drachma would've simply declined relative to other currencies until their pay matched their productivity. Every Greek would've effectively gotten a pay cut, but wouldn't have really noticed because domestic prices would've dropped by the exact same amount (only prices for imported goods would've gone up). But they were on the Euro, which basically shifted their debt burden over to the other EU countries. Greeks were overpaid, the value of the Euro went down in response, causing other EU citizens to lose value in their money (to cover for Greek debt).
Short of kicking Greece out of the Euro and forcing them to return to the Drachma, the only solutions were to (1) reduce their pay (in Euros) until it matched their actual productivity, and (2) increase their productivity to help it match their pay without having to cut their pay so much. Austerity did (1). The banking and other reforms did (2). (And for those arguing for debt forgiveness: wiping out the debt without addressing (1) and (2) would've done nothing. Until the pay vs productivity imbalance was equalized, they'd have continued amassing more debt. They were basically writing IOUs to other Euro users while they siphoned off the currency's value.)
A free-floating currency will automatically try to correct for imbalances like this. It's just how the math works. And it's why a basic income (or minimum wage) doesn't work if a substantial number of people slack off (don't generate as much productivity as they're being paid). The value of the currency itself will decrease in response. The wages of the actually productive people will increase to compensate, the net effect being to decrease the purchasing power of the basic income or minimum wage. The value of the currency and the purchasing power of the basic income or minimum wage will try to stabilize at values where the income of the productive worker and the income of the basic income / minimum wage recipient are both proportional to their real productivity.
(And before all you minimum wage supporters start furiously typing a reply - I support a minimum wage. Certain market forces can cause wages to drop significantly below the actual productivity generated by the worker. A minimum wage helps correct for that. I am just pointing out the folly in trying to turn a minimum wage into a living wage. That will only work if everything people could do for pay generates enough productivity to live off of. If there's any job whose productivity isn't enough for a person to make a living off of, then implementing a living wage as a minimum wage will either make those jobs disappear, or will devalue your currency until your living minimum wage is no longer enough to live off of.)
You and I are fortunate that Cox is playing good cable company. Caps and prices are screwed up at the other cable companies because the local governments have eliminated competition by awarding cable monopolies. If there were competition, a cable company implementing unreasonable caps or prices would put themselves out of business by causing their customers to flee to a competitor..
I don't expect those who didn't live through it to understand - your perception of the times is entirely skewed by people with an agenda twisting historical events to fit their political beliefs. So let me give you an apolitical history.
The 1970s were most shaped by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The sudden rise in oil prices sent a financial shock which sent our economy reeling almost into depression. This combined with Nixon's wage and price controls in 1971 led to stagflation - a combination of a stagnant economy and inflation. Normally, inflation picks up when the economy is vibrant, and decreases (is actually in danger of crossing over into deflation) when the economy is bad. But in the 1970s we suffered a bad economy with high inflation. According to Keynesian economic theory, that shouldn't be possible. But it was real, and those of us alive at the time had to deal with it.
Fed chair Paul Vocker (Carter appointee, who impressed Reagan enough he kept him on) had a theory that stagflation could be fought with high interest rates, which is exactly what he did. Under his policies, The U.S. Prime Rate peaked at 21.5% in Dec 1980 . Look through that history and you'll see two peaks. The 1974 peak where interest rates were trying to keep pace with inflation, and Paul Volcker's peak in the 1980s to try to deal with stagflation. Interest rates didn't return to "normal" (around 5%-7%) until the 2000s.
Whether his theory worked or stagflation disappeared on its own is irrelevant. What's important is that we eventually escaped stagflation. Inflation came down and the economy began picking up again. But it was a miserable time for us all to be living in. High unemployment, high inflation, high interest rates. You can see the U.S. suicide rate spiking immediately after the Arab oil embargo, then staying high for a sustained period through the 1980s due to the high inflation and high interest rates (basically meant trying to save money was a lost cause).
That's why the suicide rate back then was so high. Wasn't the Democrats or the Republicans or Carter or Reagan who was at fault. It was the stupid oil embargo and the weird economic corner case we somehow found ourselves in. (TFA is also sensationalist. Suicide rate was at an all-time low around 2000. So it's not that suicide rates are "surging", they're just returning to normal levels. If you're going to study an anomalous suicide rate, study why the suicide rate hit that all-time low. Don't try to characterize what's happening now as some unexpected spike.)
It gets worse. The problem with all the basic income, living minimum wage, and most welfare proposals I've seen is that the person who thought it up doesn't understand why a dollar is worth a dollar. They assume a dollar's value will remain the same after their proposal is implemented.
U.S. GDP is about $17 trillion. Total tax revenue is about 33% of that, or just under $5.6 trillion. So far so good.
What is GDP? It's gross domestic productivity. In order to generate GDP, people have to do productive things. If you implement a basic income and 90% of people decide to become pot heads and video game bums, well now your GDP is about 10% what it originally was. So your $17 trillion GDP has shrunk to $1.7 trillion. And it is impossible to reach the $5.6 trillion tax revenue needed to cover basic income even at a 100% tax rate.
See, the value of money comes from productivity. When people stop being productive, money becomes worth less. Prices rise to balance out this drop in productivity, and now your basic income isn't enough to live on anymore. If you panic and try to freeze prices because you believe the price increases are due to sellers gouging instead of your own bumbling economic policies, you're effectively forcing sellers to sell their goods at a loss, and you break the economy. The sellers end up selling their goods on the black market instead, and now not only have you broken your economy, you've broken your currency as well.
Money is just a representation of productivity so its value is not fixed, and it's folly to make economic policies under the assumption that $3 will continue to buy a gallon of milk (with a small constant allowance for inflation). The true fundamental currency is productivity. The average standard of living of a country = sum(every person's productivity) / (number of people). If people stop doing productive work, the numerator in that equation starts to decrease, and the average standard of living drops. And (assuming people's income and the money supply stays the same) the amount of milk (productivity) you can buy for $3 decreases.
For example: Imagine a vastly simplified economy of 100 people where the only good produced and consumed is milk. Average income is $30k/yr and each person on average produces 10,000 gallons of milk. Total productivity for this country is thus 1 million gallons of milk/yr, and total income is $3 million/yr.. The price of milk is thus $3/gal. And each person buys (consumes) 10,000 gallons of milk/yr.
You decide each person needs a minimum 5,000 gallons/yr of milk to live, so you implement a basic income of $15k/yr. 90 of the people become bums. Total income drops to 90*$15k + 10*$30k = $1.65 million/yr. Total milk production drops to 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $16.50/gal - enough for your basic income to buy only 909 gallons/yr of milk.
If you resist the urge to break the economy by implementing price controls, milk producing companies are now making more money per gallon sold. Consequently they can pay their employees more (each employee is still producing 10,000 gallons/yr). The wage of a worker thus increases from $30k/yr to $165k/yr. Total income is now 90*$15k + 10*$165k = $3 million/yr, while milk production says at 100,000 gallons/yr. The price of milk is now $30/gal, reducing the purchasing power of your basic income to 500 gallons/yr of milk
And so on. By the 10th iteration a working person's income is $975k and the basic income buys only 65 gallons/yr. By the 100th iteration a working person's income is $13.1 million, and the basic income only buys 11 gallons/yr. The series tries to equalize at a point where each person's income matches their productivity. In other words a basic income doesn't work - the value of the basic income tends towards the productivity of the people receiving it. If their average productivity is zero, the value of the basic income trends towards zero (the series is divergent). If their average productivity is 10% that of a worker, the value of the basic income tends towards 10% that of the worker. The value of a basic income (or minimum wage) doesn't stay at the value you originally assigned it.
Something seems off about this whole story. Blackwater is stuff that comes from your toilet. It is treated until it's solid waste. Greywater is stuff from other sources (sinks, bathtubs, showers, storm drains). It's treated, but not to the extent of blackwater.
Due to the risk of human pathogens in blackwater, only treated graywater is allowed to be used for irrigation. TFA says their study was conducted in Israel. Maybe they use treated blackwater for irrigation there since it's basically a desert? Or maybe the sludge from treated blackwater is being converted into fertilizer? Or maybe people pee in the shower there?
They all owned slaves as well.
$1, quarter - George Washington
$2, nickel - Thomas Jefferson (though I'd probably give him a pass since he apparently loved one of them, and couldn't free them because of debt)
$50 - Ulysses S. Grant (he gets a pass for freeing them despite being in debt, and the whole kicked the South's butt in the Civil War thing)
$100 - Benjamin Franklin
Or can we skip the made-up rationale, and just say we felt it was about time to put a black / staunch abolitionist / whatever on our money, and we liked Andrew Jackson the least so he's voted off the island? That explanation would be sufficient for most of us. (Out of curiosity, I looked it up - Martha Washington was the first woman on U.S. paper currency - 1886 $1 silver certificate.)
So for example if you have data servers in 8 countries, you encrypt and break your data up into 5 chunks. Create 3 additional parity chunks, and store one chunk in each country. To access the original data, you need to pull data from 5 of the 8 servers (the 3 parity chunks allow you to access your data even if access to your servers in up to 3 of those countries goes down).
Any individual country's government can hack, install backdoors on, or confiscate your servers in that country, and it won't help them read your data. In order to get a readable copy of your data, they need to pull the data from at least 5 of your servers in different countries, and have your decryption key. There's no need to pick a single country and hope that it is/remains neutral and friendly to your data.
Reminds me of a time back in the mid-1990s. I was helping run a server which hosted an email list. It had a 500 MB hard drive, which was wasn't huge but was fine for our purposes at the time. Someone tried to email an *uncompressed* photo (BMP instead of JPG) from a 2 MP digital camera (so about 6 MB in size) to the entire mailing list. The email server had dutifully copied the photo to the mailbox for each recipient whose mail was hosted on the server, until it ran out of disk space and crashed. It also got bounce messages from systems whose wiser admins had blocked attachments that large, which filled up the the mail admin's mailbox with multiple copies of the 6 MB photo (one per bounce - we'd configured the mail admin to get copies of all bounce messages so we could prune dead addresses from the list).
It crashed hard - I couldn't even login over the network. I had to use the console to get in and figure out what the problem was. The first few copies of the photo I deleted from people's mailboxes, postfix (or whatever email server we were using) noticed there was now space available on the drive, and immediately copied the photo to more recipients' mailboxes thus filling the disk again. I had to take a crash course on postfix to figure out how to delete an email from the send queue.
Linux is based on Unix, which attempts to isolate the user from direct access to any hardware. Remember, Unix was originally developed for the client-server environment back in the 1970s. You had one huge, expensive computer, which everyone in the company used together via their own terminal. The last thing you wanted was one person getting direct access to the hardware. The entire way Unix (and Linux) is designed, from user accounts to permissions to protection rings, is based on this philosophy of isolating and abstracting the hardware from the user.
Most consoles roll their own OS so they can have direct access to the hardware. They hearken back to the DOS days when the PC was a Personal Computer with only a single user, so of course whatever program you happen to be running at that moment should get complete control of the hardware.
I'm curious how the EU is going to get "Google can't require partners to use only one version of Android" to coexist with "Google needs to require vendors to update Android in a timely manner."
Nope. After IE hit about 90% market share, Microsoft figured they'd conquered the market and killed off all competitors. So they decided they'd earned a well-deserved rest and did... nothing. They stopped all development work on IE. For about 13 months they didn't add any new features to IE - the only updates were security updates (this was around 2001-2002 if I remember). This was an eternity in web browser development at the time. When Netscape and IE were competing, they were rolling out new features semi-annually or even quarterly.
That window was what allowed Firefox to take hold. Can you imagine browsing without tabs? Firefox introduced tabs, and that feature alone made it immensely popular. FF made IE look so much like a lump of coal that FF quickly jumped to about 25% market share. By the time the EU browser choice requirement was implemented (Dec 2009), FF was already over 30% market share. Google's Chrome browser had already been steadily growing in popularity for most of that year, and FF actually decreased in market share after the EU-mandated browser choice.
So it'd be more accurate to say Microsoft blew it big time by choosing to stand still because they had a monopoly, but that only cost them about a third of their monopoly. It took another quasi-monopoly (Google search + apps) to break Microsoft's OS-browser monopoly for good. I'm not sure the EU browser choice window had any effect. IE was already on the way down at the end of 2009 when the EU mandate was implemented. And the rate at which IE declined in market share didn't change appreciably from before 1Q 2010 to after.
(That's not to say I disagree with the EU mandate. I was actually more anti-Microsoft back in those days and felt they should've been broken up into an OS company and an apps company. But the problem with government regulation in software is that it just takes too damn long, and by the time it's finally implemented the entire software landscape has already changed for other reasons.)
Also worth noting: The 1918 Spanish Flu killed more people than WWI, possibly more people than WWII. And unlike the typical flu which mostly kills young children and the elderly, most of the Spanish Flu deaths were young adults. (It caused the body's immune system to overreact, meaning people with the stronger immune system were more likely to die from it.)
40 cents/W was probably some clearance price by a warehouse trying to move old stock. Average total installed costs for PV solar (including mouting, inverter, switching equipment, labor) is around $4 per Watt. (I should note that California tends to be on the expensive side. Arizona is below $3/W installed median price.) Remember folks, marketing brochures use the lowest cost. For real-world policies and implementations, you need to use the average cost.
$4/W gets you $4000/kW. Capacity factor for fixed panels in the continental U.S. (ratio of actual generation to peak generation) is about 0.145. So the price per kW of actual production is $4000 / 0.145 = $27586 / kW.
$0.115 / kWh is the average retail residential price for the U.S. A good chunk of that is transmission fees (installation and maintenance for all the wires, poles, transformers, etc), which is why net metering won't be coming back. If you can actually use all the electricity the PV panels generate on-site, then great! You're saving yourself a net $0.115/kWh and will pay for the panels in $27586 kW / $0.115/kWh = 239878 hours = 27.4 years. (It's lower in California because residential electricity prices are about $0.18/kWh, capacity factor for Southern California is around 0.18, which puts payback at around 14 years. And the state was giving large rebates to encourage people to get PV solar installed, dropping the net payback for the homeowner in some cases to around 7 years.)
From the standpoint of a power company though (which TFA is about), you need to compare this to the wholesale price of electricity. For coal that's about $0.03-$0.04 / kWh. So to recover $27586 / kW at a rate of $0.04 / kWh = 689650 hours, or a hair under 79 years for the U.S. India's payback time will be shorter because they're closer to the equator so their capacity factor will be higher. Levilized cost will be higher though because solar and wind costs are nearly all up-front meaning you have to take out a bigger loan than for other power sources. Other types of power costs are partly up-front, partly for fuel during the lifetime of the plant. But it's still getting close to the expected 30-50 year lifetime of a power plant.
Actually, this is more akin to the socialist way, where some central authority collects all the money and is charge of distributing it in a "fair" way. But does a really bad job at it.
The capitalist way would be for each author to sell their own work and collect money directly from the buyer, which is how the regular Amazon Kindle market works (except for the publishers monopolizing authors and trying to rig prices).
Brushing off the explanation I gave last time this came up.
The book authors (and newspapers) are under the mistaken impression the Internet is like a street. They see their books/newspapers as stores on this street. They feel Google, by indexing their publications, is putting a Google sign in front of their store - siphoning away some of their profit and brand recognition. That's why they keep trying to get Google to pay them.
The reality is that very little Internet traffic comes from hyperlinks anymore. The bulk of it comes from search engines like Google. In other words, yeah the Internet is the street. But Google provides the map (or GPS guidance if you prefer). And for people to be able to find your store, you have to give Google permission to put up a sign that says "hey, there's a store that sells this book here." If you try to force Google to pay you for this service they're providing for you, they'd rather just not pay and will take down the sign. Meaning you'll get no traffic.
Their relationship is symbiotic - Google provides them traffic, and they provide a reason for people to use Google Search. But they see their relationship as host and parasite, with Google as the parasite. That's why some publications have committed virtual suicide by telling Google not to index them. They don't understand this and think they're getting rid of a parasite, when in reality they're doing the equivalent of cutting off their own arms.
Any automaker who doesn't make something the public wants soon goes out of business. The manufacturers just build whatever will sell. Conspiracy theories that they are somehow keeping econoboxes or EVs off the market and these types of cars would be selling in droves if someone would just build them, represent a fundamental ignorance of this market reality. You're probably too young to remember, but econoboxes were popular for about a decade - right after the Arab oil embargo in 1973. It nearly destroyed the U.S. auto industry and did destroy Detroit, as they were unprepared and their models were all large gas guzzlers. Japanese car makers, which up to then were a tiny part of the market because their cars were undesirably small, were the beneficiary. They used that decade as a springboard to climb to their current market parity with American and European automakers.
Even Musk understood this reality - when he made the Tesla, he didn't jump straight to the Model 3. He started off with several premium luxury models, and used their sales to help advance the state of battery technology. Only now, 13 years later, is he ready to start building a mass-market EV (which is still priced near luxury-levels if you remove the Federal and state subsidies). There simply wasn't enough demand for them at their true market price a decade ago to make them viable.
The vast majority of plane crashes are caused by multiple factors which combine to bring the plane down. Eliminate any one of those factors and the plane never would have crashed.
You're correct that the loss of a single engine normally is not a serious problem. But increasing the chances of it happening also increases the chances it'll coincide with another problem, and the combination of the two (or three or more) will be enough to bring the plane down. So if at all possible, you avoid increasing the odds of any single problem occurring, period. Even if that single problem by itself could never bring down the plane.
A plane crashes, they investigate, find the cause, and issue advisories or mandate changes. People accuse them of being too reactive and not doing enough to prevent accidents before they happen.
They try to anticipate problems before they happen, issue advisories and make regulations. People accuse them of stirring up irrational fears.
You can't have it both ways. The FAA takes an extremely cautious approach to regulation. e.g. The computers on most new planes are 1-2 decades old. They won't allow newer technology in avionics systems because it doesn't have a long enough industrial track record to reveal any long-term problems which might crop up. So for example, those swelling capacitors which plagued home computers in the early 2000s never made it aboard planes. This overabundance of caution is because if you screw up, the resulting accident is nearly 100% fatal. Vehicle accidents start to become fatal around 40-50 mph, and by 100 mph they are almost always 100% fatal. That means nearly all plane crashes are 100% fatal.
So they don't screw around. If there's even the slightest risk of a new technology causing an accident (e.g. phones and laptops being used in-flight), you ban it for a decade or two. Study it, gauge the risks, and only after you're thoroughly convinced it's safe do you allow it. If the FAA turns out to be wrong about drones, they can shrug and say "I guess we were wrong," and all they'll have done is inconvenienced a bunch of hobbyists around airports for a decade or two. If you turn out to be wrong and drone-airliner collisions aren't safe, shrugging and saying "I guess I was wrong" won't be enough. A couple hundred people will be dead, and the people running the FAA will be hauled into Congress for an inquiry where their competence is called into question. The consequence matrix here is skewed wildly in favor of taking the overly cautious approach.
You're misconstruing Nationalism as the cause. Nationalism is a symptom. When a people feel marginalized or threatened by outsiders, it stirs up Nationalism. With the Nazis, it was the Treaty of Versailles which forced Germany to pay reparations for damages to other WWI combatants. That exacerbated the global depression in Germany, eventually leading to the Nazi party winning the plurality of votes and seats in the 1932 election. In Rawanda it was the Arusha Accords which was negotiated by multiple outside powers as a way for the majority Hutus to share power with the minority Tutsi - a group they'd formerly been at war with.
People in a country have to feel that they're deciding their own fates to accept change. When they feel their fate is being determined by outsiders somehow exerting influence or forcing conditions onto them, it will stir up nationalism. That is the true cause. Currently in the U.S., it's manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas faster than those former workers could adapt and retrain for new jobs, and the spectre of illegal immigrants being made citizens so they can vote.
As well intentioned as your social engineering project may be, and no matter how great the improved economic efficiency from offshoring, you have to make those changes at a slow enough pace so as not to make a large segment of the population feel that they're losing control of their own country. In that respect, the early stages of Nationalism are healthy - they provide a moderating force which steers the country away from such quick political change, giving people time to get used to the idea of that change and adapt. But criticizing it and demonizing it as you're doing will just radicalizes it and makes it flare up worse. Which is eventually what allows the Hitlers to come into power.
Technically, Samsung did it first on a phone with their finger hover detection (AirView). The functionality is different, but the implementation is exactly the same - all that differs is the range of sensitivity.
In response to massive avalanches caused by snowpacks becoming gigantic and eventually collapsing from their own weight, resorts and mountain towns started using explosives to deliberately cause avalanches when the snowpacks were still small. There were more avalanches, but they were smaller - not large enough to be destructive to human infrastructure.
We accidentally stumbled onto the exact same thing with earthquakes. When the oil companies started fracking, we discovered the extra lubrication could trigger small earthquakes. Unfortunately, because a huge political movement was opposed to fracking, the headlines weren't "Fracking relieves stress which would've eventually caused a bigger earthquake." They were "Fracking causes earthquakes" - implying that all the energy of the earthquake somehow came from fracking, which is pure nonsense.
And possibly the greatest tool mankind has yet discovered that could help mitigate earthquake damage was turned into a political hot potato nobody will want to touch for fear of liability. Geothermal energy - the only "clean" energy source which could potentially have replaced base load power plants - has already become a casualty of this gross ignorance of the principle of Conservation of Energy.
The same thing is happening on the Democratic side. Clinton has a narrow lead among delegates determined by popular vote - 1289 vs 1045, or 55% vs 45%. But because of the Democrat's system of party-appointed superdelegates which are breaking for Clinton 469 vs 31, it gives the illusion of her lead being an insurmountable 1758 vs 1076, or 62% vs 38%. Essentially, the Democrat party bosses have rigged it so in any primary where the top candidates are separated by less than about 10% (which is pretty much all elections in the U.S. which are contested), they get to decide who wins, not the people. And the "lead" is exaggerated earlier when not all states have held their primaries.
Both parties are exploiting a long-standing problem with our voting system - the idea that whoever gets the most votes wins. While a truly fair voting system is impossible, it is possible to reduce the chance of outcomes contradictory to the people's general will. Our current voting system - plurality wins - is just about the worst system possible. More accurate results come about from an instant-runoff system, where the least popular choices are eliminated one at a time, until only the top two choices are pitted head to head and one of them has to get the majority of votes.
The parties reject this because such voting systems tend to elect centrist candidates (they are, after all, more representative of the entire population). Both parties are controlled by extremists, either on the far left or far right. In fact the whole primary system exists to select candidates which are centrist-to-extremist within their own party (far left or far right relative to the entire voting population), and eliminate candidates who are centrist and more representative of the entire voting population. That's why Paul and Christie were eliminated early (they're both centrist), and the RNC is working so hard to prevent Trump from winning the nomination (he's also fairly moderate, which some of his philosophies actually aligning better with the left).
If Trump doesn't win a majority of delegates, the control wielded by the Republican Party bosses will be plain for everyone to see. Whereas the control wielded by the Democrat Party bosses is masquerading as popular votes which weren't decided by popular vote.
That reasoning leads to a logical contradiction.
Imagine I'm categorizing philosophies about tolerance into two groups - those which are tolerant, and those which are not. I get to "tolerance of intolerance". It's tolerating everything, so I categorize it as a tolerant philosophy.
But then someone like you argues that since it doesn't actively oppose intolerance, it's actually an intolerant philosophy. So I categorize it among the intolerant philosophies.
Now we get to your philosophy which is intolerant of "tolerance of intolerance". It does not tolerate something, so it seems like I should classify it among the intolerant philosophies. You wave your hands and explain that it's only rejecting another philosophy's intolerance, so it's really tolerance.
Someone decides they don't like your philosophy. Their philosophy is intolerance of your philosophy (which is intolerant of "tolerance of intolerance"). By your own hand-waving argument, since it's only rejecting another philosophy's intolerance (your intolerance), it too should be classified among the tolerant philosophies. And you end up with a situation where a philosophy and its polar opposite are both classified as tolerant. Contradiction.
If you're advocating a philosophy which tolerates everything, then it must in fact tolerate everything (essentially Buddhism). The moment you refuse to tolerate some things - even intolerance - your philosophy joins the countless other philosophies which are intolerant of some things. And the only question that's left then is deciding what things shouldn't you tolerate.
The same issue crops up with Democracy, or the idea that the people should be able to vote for the government they want. Should the people also be allowed to reject Democracy? If you say no, their government must remain Democratic, then it's not really Democratic since it would be denying the will of the people as determined by a popular vote if they voted to reject Democracy. Only if you allow the people to reject Democracy can a system be truly Democratic.