"They offered me [perks], they offered me everything but cash," the junkyard owner said
So what's the deal?
If the prototype was taken from NASA without permission, technically it's stolen government property. And they can just take it back without paying the guy anything. Furthermore, I think knowingly taking receipt of stolen government property and attempting to sell it back to the government is a crime. If the guy tries to be difficult, they'll probably play that card. NASA's initial feelers are probably attempts to resolve this amicably without turning into a lawsuit and/or criminal trial.
Snowden has narrowed down his information releases to one specific topic - secret government monitoring of civilian communications channels. In both the U.S. and EU, Snowden is probably right and this was illegal on the part of the government. Assange (and Manning) took an indiscriminate approach and just released everything they could get their hands on, legal or illegal, right or wrong. No government with secrets of their own is going to condone or encourage the latter.
IOW, Snowden was blowing the whistle to try to stop the train to save it. Assange and Manning were trying to derail the train.
Honestly, it should be illegal not to provide credit for downtime. I signed a contract with my cable internet service. In exchange for $x/mo, they provide me with 730 hours of service. If they only provide me with 729 hours, they should credit me for the hour they failed to provide. Yes it'll be on the order of 10 cents, but multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000 customers and it starts to become a real incentive to avoid downtime. The only exception should be scheduled downtime where they give me plenty of advance warning about the upcoming service outage.
I think there's something to be said for learning programming on a very simple machine.
Well, not too simple. The computer I learned to program on didn't have external storage. I had to type in the programs again by hand every time I turned the computer off and back on. Course that's a lot easier when the computer only has 2kB of RAM...
Compare that with booting up Windows/MacOSX/Linux, getting into your desktop environment, loading up a browser or IDE, creating a new project, explaining the UI of the IDE, making sure you have the right includes to do IO, directing your output to console or a UI object, etc...
Actually, the biggest impediment (if you can call it that) I see with modern GUIs and learning programming is that they're all event based. You write up separate pieces of code and they all kinda float around out there until magically the right piece runs when a certain event occurs. The "magic" which makes the right piece run (like on a mouse click) is nearly always hidden in some included library, so you don't get the sense that the code you wrote is completely in control of the machine.
Conceptually, it's a lot easier for a beginner to grasp procedural based code like BASIC or LOGO or even assembly (that's what we used in my jr. high computer math class on huge HP programmable calculators with punch card readers). You tell the computer to do something, and it does exactly what you told it to do. Or maybe not; maybe I'm biased because that's how I learned. I'd love to hear from people who learned event-based coding first.
Sometimes I wish we could just treat them by their own standards. They think it's OK to decide to censor other people's speech, therefore they have no grounds for complaining if other people decide to censor their speech.
(Un)fortunately, as a believer in free speech, that includes the right of people who don't believe in free speech to speak their mind. Somehow the concept of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," seems to have been lost upon these people.
My personal philosophy is that the point of writing is to convey information. Consequently, I try to write as clearly and simply as possible to make what I'm saying easy to understand. I gave the first draft of my thesis to my advisor and... he told me my writing was too simple. I had to use more complex words and sentences, and excess repetition (his exact words were "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said").
Along the same lines, my thesis work was dependent on another researcher's work so I had to follow the papers he was putting out. His writing was incredibly dense with very complex sentence structures which sometimes took several minutes to unravel. From his name, I could tell he was Indian so I figured he wasn't fluent in English or something. I finally got to meet him and... his English was perfect and when he spoke about his work it was incredibly easy to follow. I asked him why his writing was so inscrutable. He said he wrote like that because it was expected of him when publishing, and because it made him sound more intelligent.
No thank you. One of the best papers I came across during my research was Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is easy to read and understand, yet concise and detailed. It's so easy to follow I've given copies of it to co-workers who were attempting to solve problems related to or similar to information theory, but who weren't trained in information theory. And they've all been able to digest it in one or two nights of bedtime reading. That is how knowledge should be passed.
Recently I was late on paying a Chase card, and I literally got called every single day about the matter. Eventually I called up and said, hey, I'm unemployed, I'm waiting on a check to arrive, and the rep explained that they will be robodialing my phone every single day until it is paid.
Damn, I wish every bank and credit card company did this. Heck, I think there should be a law requiring them to do this.
I knew I had put a $10 charge on my BofA credit card (my lone annual charge to prevent them from closing the card). I waited for the bill to arrive, and waited, and waited, and nothing. So I called the number on the card to speak to a rep, verified there was $10 due, and mailed them a payment check. I figured the matter was over with, and wasn't concerned when I didn't get a bill since they don't normally send a statement for a zero balance.
Three months later I applied for a mortgage... and was turned down due to a past due account. It turns out the $10 payment I sent arrived the day after the due date, and they'd immediately tacked on a $35 late fee. Whatever problem caused my first bill to never arrive caused the subsequent bills to not arrive, so I never knew about this late fee or the overdue account. During this time, BofA never called me to try to figure out what was going on or to try to resolve the issue. They just dinged my credit without so much as a courtesy call (it's still the only black mark on my credit report, and will be for another year).
A similar thing happened to my parents. There was a 5 cent discrepancy when they closed a BofA card caused by someone at BofA cashing their payment check for $xx.90 when it was written as $xx.95. It was only 5 cents so my mom sent a 5 cent check to take care of it. Unbeknownst to her, BofA had tacked on interest so the 5 cents didn't settle the matter. And because there was an amount due they hadn't closed the account so it was building up late fees. But apparently their billing department thought the account was closed because my parents never got any subsequent statements for the account. BofA never called them about it to try to get it resolved, they just silently dinged their credit. No amount of complaining or arguing with BofA got them to remove the negative from their credit reports despite it being completely BofA's fault. We've since ceased all business with BofA.
It's basically harassment, but there isn't much I can do because it's a bunch of different debt collectors, rather than just one company.
What happens is a debt collector tries to collect from you. When they can't, they sell the debt to another debt collector, and the cycle repeats.
My dad got a debt collection letter (Verizon credited his payment to his old account, decided his new account was overdue and sold it to a debt collector without ever calling him). I drafted a letter explaining the Verizon screwup, along with copies of his canceled payment checks showing he'd paid Verizon on time every month for the period in question. I also instructed them to attach a copy of the letter if they sold the debt to anyone. They never called or mailed again so my documentation must have been satisfactory. A year later, my dad got another a letter from a different debt collector for the same issue...
Its a fine platform, but its also devilishly expensive to operate, having more than twice the per-flight-hour cost of the B-52.
The B-1B has more than 2x the payload capacity of the B-52. 125,000 pounds vs. 60,000 pounds. So the cost per flight hour isn't the issue since each B-1B effectively replaces two B-52s. IIRC, the problem was lower availability (greater downtime for maintenance) than the B-52, and intelligence from a Soviet defector that the new (at the time) MiG-31 had look-down radar capability which rendered the B-1B's stealth capabilities ineffective.
This isn't new. Henry Ford stumbled across the same thing when he paid his auto workers $5/day - an unheard of figure at the time when average pay was closer to $2/day. He didn't do it because he was feeling altruistic. His factories were suffering from huge turnover, and it was expensive having to constantly train new workers. So he figured what the hell and jacked the pay up to reduce turnover.
What he discovered quite by accident was that while the $2/day pay seemed to be favorable for the employer, it wasn't favorable for the economy overall. That is, too much of the company's income was going to the company's owners who wasted it on stupid things like gold toilet seats which don't really help the economy. A $5/day wage seemed like it would lower the company's profitability, but the boost it gave to the economy more than offset that decrease since the average worker spends a greater share of his income necessities which help the economy. Like being able to buy the cars that Ford was manufacturing. And the net effect was that his company made even more money than at $2/day.
You can see the same thing if you compare the GDP per capita of various countries. The ones with greater income inequality tend to have lower GDP per capita. This is why despite being a fiscal conservative, I've never had a problem with unions (except in government jobs where there's no fiscal counter). Their functional mechanics may not be optimal, but they serve a valuable role in the economy.
The U.S. is a stark outlier in the above graph. It has one of the highest GDP per capita, but it's been regressing in Gini coefficient for a few decades now. To me, that indicates our GDP per capita could be much higher if we could get our income distribution to be more equitable. Yes that'll mean CEOs and mutual fund managers won't be able to afford as big a superyacht. But that money in the hands of the middle class would be much more productive for the economy than cruising around enjoying the scenery while burning 10 gallons of fuel per mile. $70k as a minimum wage probably overshoots the optimal point, but we're far enough below the optimal point that I'm not surprised the dire predictions for the company didn't come true.
(And yes, I really am a fiscal conservative. What both liberals and conservatives have to realize is that they're both right. Under certain economic conditions, liberal philosophies are correct. Under other economic conditions, conservative philosophies are correct. The trick is to figure out where the transition points are and not to stick with one philosophy long after you've left the regime in the solution space where it's true. Like believing that since some regulations are good, therefore completely regulating everything to make a state-controlled economy is best. Or if that since sometimes deregulation is good, completely deregulating everything is best. Even the Henry Ford example I gave above works only up to the point where workers start to lose incentive to improve due to insufficient increase in salary from those improvements.)
The dealers already pay Chevy it's price. The only wiggle room you get is on the dealers profit.
So you, an individual who buys a car once every few years, think you can negotiate a as good a deal from the manufacturer than a bunch of dealers who buy hundreds if not thousands of cars from the manufacturer each month?
If you think your negotiating skill is that great, then you should have no problem negotiating a good price from dealers. If your negotiating skills suck, then you're far more likely to be taken to the cleaners by the manufacturer than by multiple middlemen in competition with each other.
I know Tesla is everyone's darling, but they're in a unique position because of their low sales volume. In pretty much all other industries, manufacturers don't want to deal with direct sales because it introduces variables like market projections, overhead like leasing warehouse space, and the logistics of dealing with product returns. They'd rather just concentrate on making the product, and ink a deal for 10,000 units with a middleman (supermarket, department store, electronics retailer, etc) and be done with it. The middleman handles all the marketing projections (to figure out how many items their geographical area needs), advertising, inventory, and returns.
How did this person end up with the rover in the first place? It's unclear. NASA did not respond to a Motherboard request for more specifics, but an attorney quoted in the report noted that early Apollo prototypes were rarely tagged and often went missing.
Also, the person who sold it for scrap inherited it when the "owner" (who presumably acquired it from NASA and knew its value) passed away. NASA dragged its feet contacting the new owner, who apparently didn't know its value.
College gives you a piece of paper which tells a prospective employer that you aren't lying when you say you're competent at the job you're applying for. That piece of paper is unnecessary if you're starting your own business - you can't lie to yourself about your own competence (well, you can, but people who do that usually wind up bankrupt pretty quickly).
The folks you've listed didn't drop out of college because they lacked competence or didn't think education wasn't important. They dropped out because they were presented with a business opportunity with a much better potential payoff than completing college for that piece of paper.
Truman already had knowledge of intercepted messages indicating that the Japanese were prepared to surrender.
Which is why Japan immediately surrendered after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Oh, wait. No, they didn't.
You're twisting history to try to condemn something you dislike (the atomic bombings). The Allied forces had drafted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan and outlining how the Allies would treat Japan in exchange. Yes Japan was willing to surrender, but only if key provisions of the Potsdam Declaration were changed in their favor. In other words, they wanted to keep fighting to try to gain better terms for surrender.
By best accounts, the first bombing was met with disbelief among those in power in Imperial Japan. That the reports of the city being gone were inaccurate, or this was some sort of trick - a regular bombing raid and not just a single plane. They wanted to continue to fight, or negotiate for better terms of surrender. It took the second bombing (and the Soviets breaking their non-aggression pact and declaring war on Japan) to convince the emperor to overrule the hawks and surrender unconditionally. In fact there was even a rebellion by some of those hawks to try to take over the government after the surrender was announced.
There's a tendency for people to compare decisions like these against a vacuum. i.e. To compare the atomic bombings to if the bombs hadn't been dropped but the rest of history proceeded the exact same way. You can't compare to a vacuum like that. For those of us who grew up in countries which were occupied by Japan at the time, we were living in a hell of subjugation, inhumane treatment, and executions. Japanese soldiers forced my grandmother to watch as they raped and killed her sister and niece, all to coerce my grandfather (a doctor) into treating their commanding officer. Any act which might shorten that hell was justifiable. For people in the occupied territories, the atomic bombings meant liberation. Roughly 15% of the people killed in the Hiroshima bombing were Koreans brought over to Japan for slave labor. Aside from the lack of recognition (they're classified as Japanese deaths because Korea didn't exist as a country at the time) Korea has never complained about those deaths. Because as a price of liberation, those deaths were worth it.
10-15 million civilians were killed during the Japanese occupation. That works out to an average of about 150,000 killed by the Japanese each month. If the atomic bombings shortened the war by just 2 months, it was worth it purely on those numbers alone (never mind the number who would've been killed in an invasion of the Japanese mainland). That's the context you have to compare the bombings against. Japan likes to play the "innocent" victim in the atomic bombings, but they weren't innocent. They were guilty as hell of a mass extermination on the order of the Holocaust in Europe. Hastening the end of that extermination was completely justified.
As I understand it the US has about 18GW of solar PV installed capacity with about a 28% capacity factor - so roughly 5 GW of actual power generation.
PV solar capacity factor for the U.S. is about 14.5%, about 18.5% for the desert southwest for fixed-mount panels. This is a physical limitation imposed by geometry, the movement of the sun, and typical weather conditions.
The 28% capacity factor the EIA gives for PV solar is for utility-scale PV solar installations. These generally track the sun and/or use concentrators (for some odd reason, capacity factor for PV with concentrators is calculated based on the panel's max generation without a concentrator - i.e. they can theoretically exceed 100% capacity factor).
Power generation for PV solar in the U.S. for 2015 (Jan-Jul) has been 13,841 GWh. Divide that by the 5113.5 hours in 7 months and you get 2.7 GW average production. That's missing the fall and winter months for the latter half of the year so the average generation by December will be slightly lower than that. Doubling the Jan-Jun production yields an annual average of 2.6 GW. If you divide 2.6 GW by the 18 GW of installed capacity, you get a 14.4% capacity factor as expected.
These two new reactors will generate 77% as much power as all of the country's installed PV solar.
It's fascinating watching the mental gymnastics people are going through to try to preserve their desire to have both "it just works" and "I want to control it" coexist.
Android just lets you set a threshold for how many GB (or MB) of cellular data you can use in your billing cycle. When you hit it, it warns you or automatically shuts off cellular data. Yes it's an extra step and requires you to know when you billing cycle starts and what your data cap is, so isn't as simple as "it just works.". But it seems to me it's a whole lot simpler than the convoluted colored pie wedge indicator icon idea you've come up with. What good is knowing what proportion of your current data use is cellular, if you don't know how close you are to your cap?
If you let yourself be pigeonholed by artificial absolute rules (e.g. "in the interest of simplicity, it must just work"), you needlessly limit the possible solutions. Which can result in the simplest solution compliant with your "simplicity" rule being a lot more complicated than the simplest solution which does not comply with your "simplicity" rule. The only absolute rule is that there are no absolute rules (except this one).
There is no room for ethics on capitalism. The market sets the rate, based on what people are to pay. Since people will die if they don't take the drug, they will pay every penny they have (or that their insurance is willing to give).
Actually, that only happens when there's some "ethical" government regulation prohibiting a competing company from making the drug. Like a patent.
In an "unethical" capitalistic society, if someone buys up all of drug which costs 50 cents per pill to make and tries to sell it for $750, someone else will just start making that drug for 50 cents and try to sell it at $700. Then someone else tries to sell it for $650, then $600, and so on. Until the price comes down to just above 50 cents and the competitor is afraid to undercut the price anymore because then the margin won't be enough to cover his marketing and distribution expenses.
You gain / maintain respect by ensuring those wearing the uniform of a Law Enforcement agency act like professionals instead of thugs.
The problem is police situations rarely if ever resolve themselves into black and white instances where an action is "professional" or "thug-like". There's a substantial grey area in between where some observers would interpret the action as appropriate and professional, while others would interpret it as thug-like.
You SHOW the people that criminal and thuggish behavior will not be tolerated by those in uniform. A zero tolerance policy to remove the idiots and a better screening process to remove them from the pool before they're even hired.
A zero-tolerance policy just means you're going to classify all of these grey areas as black. Even the U.S. Constitution does not go that far, requiring that criminal trials be decided by a jury of only 12 people (not everyone in the country) and only "beyond a reasonable doubt" (not beyond all doubt).
I agree the police are too frequently erring on the overagressive side. But this is a complex social problem without any clear solutions. Anyone who claims otherwise (either pro-police or anti-police) is just letting their personal biases get in the way of an objective analysis of the problem. The solution is mostly going to involve training officers to quickly categorize scenarios, and use pre-approved responses for that particular scenario. Judging them after the fact just invites biased retroactive revision of the policy (e.g. it turns out the subject was black instead of a generic person). This is already done in pretty much all police jurisdictions. The internal police investigations after a controversial incident is mostly about determining if the officer followed the correct procedure he was trained to follow in the particular situation where the incident happened.
And even if you have the best possible system in place, there are still going to be outlier incidents. Where an innocent suspect or an officer is killed because the police followed procedure but the specifics of the scenario subverted basic assumptions about the appropriate trained response.
In fact, the sleazy cost-saving measure would be to fire all the company's EMTs and medical staff, and tell all employees to just call 911 and wait for the city's EMTs to arrive.
Put another way, imagine the universe is a simulation. The programmer didn't want to waste CPU cycles simulating every single atomic particle, so when no meaningful atomic-scale interactions are occurring, the simulation uses a simpler statistical model instead.
When the laser light is striking the atoms in the lattice, the interactions between the light and lattice force the simulation to model every individual atom and photon. So each them are modeled precisely, and no tunneling occurs.
When the laser light is not striking the atoms in the lattice, there's no need to model every (non-)interaction and the simulation reverts to a statistical model. When the laser is turned on again you can locate the position of every atom again. Since the original lattice arrangement was not "saved", the simulation has to generate a new arrangement of atoms in the lattice. This new arrangement is statistically identical to the original, but little details like the positions of individual atoms are not identical. The misplaced atoms appear to have "moved", and we call those movements "tunneling".
Now let's get on to the sparsely populated areas. The USA has a higher population density than Sweden, and Sweden's internet is excellent, so it can't just be a population thing.
Enough of the silly Sweden to U.S. comparisons. The vast majority of Sweden's population is concentrated in a few dozen tiny regions (Sweden is the one in the middle). It is not like the U.S. The cities in the U.S. tend to be more spread out instead of tightly grouped, and there are a helluva lot more of them. Economic viability of high speed internet depends on the former, and the number of interconnects needed to connect all of them depends on the latter.
Amazon is making moves in e-commerce that's put Walmart so far behind that it might not be able to catch up for 10 more years, if ever."
In 1999, Amazon was a fledgling company with annual revenue of $1.6 billion; Walmart's was about $138 billion. By last year, Amazon's revenue was about 54 times what it was in 1999, nearly $89 billion, almost all of it from online sales. Walmart's was about three times what it was 15 years before, almost $486 billion, and only a small fraction of that â" 2.5 percent, or $12.2 billion â" came from Walmart.com.
That's not how I'd interpret those numbers. Amazon is is burning cash (have yet to post a profit) and after 15 years they've managed to increase their online sales to $89 billion. Walmart isn't even trying and they've managed to reach $12.2 billion in online sales - 1/7th Amazon's. Furthermore, the growth of Walmart's retail sales, $486 - $138 - $12.2 = $336 billion, is nearly 4x Amazon's growth in those 15 years.
I love Amazon and I'm a long-time Prime member. But until this story I had no idea growth in retail sales was far outstripping growth in online sales. Looking up some graphs, I see now that the stories I'd been reading about how online sales were "catching up" to retail sales were based on percentage growth, not actual dollar growth. And that as a flat dollar amount, retail sales have in fact been growing far more than online sales.
Some of Amazon's strategic moves that had been head-scratchers now make sense. Like how they agreed to charge sales tax so they could establish warehouses and depots in most states. Or the crazy idea of delivery by drone. They're trying to crack into that retail market with same-day delivery.
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If the prototype was taken from NASA without permission, technically it's stolen government property. And they can just take it back without paying the guy anything. Furthermore, I think knowingly taking receipt of stolen government property and attempting to sell it back to the government is a crime. If the guy tries to be difficult, they'll probably play that card. NASA's initial feelers are probably attempts to resolve this amicably without turning into a lawsuit and/or criminal trial.
Snowden has narrowed down his information releases to one specific topic - secret government monitoring of civilian communications channels. In both the U.S. and EU, Snowden is probably right and this was illegal on the part of the government. Assange (and Manning) took an indiscriminate approach and just released everything they could get their hands on, legal or illegal, right or wrong. No government with secrets of their own is going to condone or encourage the latter.
IOW, Snowden was blowing the whistle to try to stop the train to save it. Assange and Manning were trying to derail the train.
Honestly, it should be illegal not to provide credit for downtime. I signed a contract with my cable internet service. In exchange for $x/mo, they provide me with 730 hours of service. If they only provide me with 729 hours, they should credit me for the hour they failed to provide. Yes it'll be on the order of 10 cents, but multiply that by 10,000 or 100,000 customers and it starts to become a real incentive to avoid downtime. The only exception should be scheduled downtime where they give me plenty of advance warning about the upcoming service outage.
Well, not too simple. The computer I learned to program on didn't have external storage. I had to type in the programs again by hand every time I turned the computer off and back on. Course that's a lot easier when the computer only has 2kB of RAM...
Actually, the biggest impediment (if you can call it that) I see with modern GUIs and learning programming is that they're all event based. You write up separate pieces of code and they all kinda float around out there until magically the right piece runs when a certain event occurs. The "magic" which makes the right piece run (like on a mouse click) is nearly always hidden in some included library, so you don't get the sense that the code you wrote is completely in control of the machine.
Conceptually, it's a lot easier for a beginner to grasp procedural based code like BASIC or LOGO or even assembly (that's what we used in my jr. high computer math class on huge HP programmable calculators with punch card readers). You tell the computer to do something, and it does exactly what you told it to do. Or maybe not; maybe I'm biased because that's how I learned. I'd love to hear from people who learned event-based coding first.
Anybody who's spent more than 10 seconds thinking about the math already understands that it was a farce all along.
Ergo the one child policy has never been strictly enforced. Claims that it was were nothing more than government propaganda.
Sometimes I wish we could just treat them by their own standards. They think it's OK to decide to censor other people's speech, therefore they have no grounds for complaining if other people decide to censor their speech.
(Un)fortunately, as a believer in free speech, that includes the right of people who don't believe in free speech to speak their mind. Somehow the concept of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," seems to have been lost upon these people.
My personal philosophy is that the point of writing is to convey information. Consequently, I try to write as clearly and simply as possible to make what I'm saying easy to understand. I gave the first draft of my thesis to my advisor and... he told me my writing was too simple. I had to use more complex words and sentences, and excess repetition (his exact words were "say what you're going to say, say it, then say what you just said").
Along the same lines, my thesis work was dependent on another researcher's work so I had to follow the papers he was putting out. His writing was incredibly dense with very complex sentence structures which sometimes took several minutes to unravel. From his name, I could tell he was Indian so I figured he wasn't fluent in English or something. I finally got to meet him and... his English was perfect and when he spoke about his work it was incredibly easy to follow. I asked him why his writing was so inscrutable. He said he wrote like that because it was expected of him when publishing, and because it made him sound more intelligent.
No thank you. One of the best papers I came across during my research was Claude Shannon's A Mathematical Theory of Communication. It is easy to read and understand, yet concise and detailed. It's so easy to follow I've given copies of it to co-workers who were attempting to solve problems related to or similar to information theory, but who weren't trained in information theory. And they've all been able to digest it in one or two nights of bedtime reading. That is how knowledge should be passed.
Damn, I wish every bank and credit card company did this. Heck, I think there should be a law requiring them to do this.
I knew I had put a $10 charge on my BofA credit card (my lone annual charge to prevent them from closing the card). I waited for the bill to arrive, and waited, and waited, and nothing. So I called the number on the card to speak to a rep, verified there was $10 due, and mailed them a payment check. I figured the matter was over with, and wasn't concerned when I didn't get a bill since they don't normally send a statement for a zero balance.
Three months later I applied for a mortgage... and was turned down due to a past due account. It turns out the $10 payment I sent arrived the day after the due date, and they'd immediately tacked on a $35 late fee. Whatever problem caused my first bill to never arrive caused the subsequent bills to not arrive, so I never knew about this late fee or the overdue account. During this time, BofA never called me to try to figure out what was going on or to try to resolve the issue. They just dinged my credit without so much as a courtesy call (it's still the only black mark on my credit report, and will be for another year).
A similar thing happened to my parents. There was a 5 cent discrepancy when they closed a BofA card caused by someone at BofA cashing their payment check for $xx.90 when it was written as $xx.95. It was only 5 cents so my mom sent a 5 cent check to take care of it. Unbeknownst to her, BofA had tacked on interest so the 5 cents didn't settle the matter. And because there was an amount due they hadn't closed the account so it was building up late fees. But apparently their billing department thought the account was closed because my parents never got any subsequent statements for the account. BofA never called them about it to try to get it resolved, they just silently dinged their credit. No amount of complaining or arguing with BofA got them to remove the negative from their credit reports despite it being completely BofA's fault. We've since ceased all business with BofA.
What happens is a debt collector tries to collect from you. When they can't, they sell the debt to another debt collector, and the cycle repeats.
My dad got a debt collection letter (Verizon credited his payment to his old account, decided his new account was overdue and sold it to a debt collector without ever calling him). I drafted a letter explaining the Verizon screwup, along with copies of his canceled payment checks showing he'd paid Verizon on time every month for the period in question. I also instructed them to attach a copy of the letter if they sold the debt to anyone. They never called or mailed again so my documentation must have been satisfactory. A year later, my dad got another a letter from a different debt collector for the same issue...
The B-1B has more than 2x the payload capacity of the B-52. 125,000 pounds vs. 60,000 pounds. So the cost per flight hour isn't the issue since each B-1B effectively replaces two B-52s. IIRC, the problem was lower availability (greater downtime for maintenance) than the B-52, and intelligence from a Soviet defector that the new (at the time) MiG-31 had look-down radar capability which rendered the B-1B's stealth capabilities ineffective.
This isn't new. Henry Ford stumbled across the same thing when he paid his auto workers $5/day - an unheard of figure at the time when average pay was closer to $2/day. He didn't do it because he was feeling altruistic. His factories were suffering from huge turnover, and it was expensive having to constantly train new workers. So he figured what the hell and jacked the pay up to reduce turnover.
What he discovered quite by accident was that while the $2/day pay seemed to be favorable for the employer, it wasn't favorable for the economy overall. That is, too much of the company's income was going to the company's owners who wasted it on stupid things like gold toilet seats which don't really help the economy. A $5/day wage seemed like it would lower the company's profitability, but the boost it gave to the economy more than offset that decrease since the average worker spends a greater share of his income necessities which help the economy. Like being able to buy the cars that Ford was manufacturing. And the net effect was that his company made even more money than at $2/day.
You can see the same thing if you compare the GDP per capita of various countries. The ones with greater income inequality tend to have lower GDP per capita. This is why despite being a fiscal conservative, I've never had a problem with unions (except in government jobs where there's no fiscal counter). Their functional mechanics may not be optimal, but they serve a valuable role in the economy.
The U.S. is a stark outlier in the above graph. It has one of the highest GDP per capita, but it's been regressing in Gini coefficient for a few decades now. To me, that indicates our GDP per capita could be much higher if we could get our income distribution to be more equitable. Yes that'll mean CEOs and mutual fund managers won't be able to afford as big a superyacht. But that money in the hands of the middle class would be much more productive for the economy than cruising around enjoying the scenery while burning 10 gallons of fuel per mile. $70k as a minimum wage probably overshoots the optimal point, but we're far enough below the optimal point that I'm not surprised the dire predictions for the company didn't come true.
(And yes, I really am a fiscal conservative. What both liberals and conservatives have to realize is that they're both right. Under certain economic conditions, liberal philosophies are correct. Under other economic conditions, conservative philosophies are correct. The trick is to figure out where the transition points are and not to stick with one philosophy long after you've left the regime in the solution space where it's true. Like believing that since some regulations are good, therefore completely regulating everything to make a state-controlled economy is best. Or if that since sometimes deregulation is good, completely deregulating everything is best. Even the Henry Ford example I gave above works only up to the point where workers start to lose incentive to improve due to insufficient increase in salary from those improvements.)
So you, an individual who buys a car once every few years, think you can negotiate a as good a deal from the manufacturer than a bunch of dealers who buy hundreds if not thousands of cars from the manufacturer each month?
If you think your negotiating skill is that great, then you should have no problem negotiating a good price from dealers. If your negotiating skills suck, then you're far more likely to be taken to the cleaners by the manufacturer than by multiple middlemen in competition with each other.
I know Tesla is everyone's darling, but they're in a unique position because of their low sales volume. In pretty much all other industries, manufacturers don't want to deal with direct sales because it introduces variables like market projections, overhead like leasing warehouse space, and the logistics of dealing with product returns. They'd rather just concentrate on making the product, and ink a deal for 10,000 units with a middleman (supermarket, department store, electronics retailer, etc) and be done with it. The middleman handles all the marketing projections (to figure out how many items their geographical area needs), advertising, inventory, and returns.
Also, the person who sold it for scrap inherited it when the "owner" (who presumably acquired it from NASA and knew its value) passed away. NASA dragged its feet contacting the new owner, who apparently didn't know its value.
If you aren't paying for a service, you aren't the customer. You're the product being sold.
College gives you a piece of paper which tells a prospective employer that you aren't lying when you say you're competent at the job you're applying for. That piece of paper is unnecessary if you're starting your own business - you can't lie to yourself about your own competence (well, you can, but people who do that usually wind up bankrupt pretty quickly).
The folks you've listed didn't drop out of college because they lacked competence or didn't think education wasn't important. They dropped out because they were presented with a business opportunity with a much better potential payoff than completing college for that piece of paper.
Which is why Japan immediately surrendered after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Oh, wait. No, they didn't.
You're twisting history to try to condemn something you dislike (the atomic bombings). The Allied forces had drafted the Potsdam Declaration demanding the unconditional surrender of Japan and outlining how the Allies would treat Japan in exchange. Yes Japan was willing to surrender, but only if key provisions of the Potsdam Declaration were changed in their favor. In other words, they wanted to keep fighting to try to gain better terms for surrender.
By best accounts, the first bombing was met with disbelief among those in power in Imperial Japan. That the reports of the city being gone were inaccurate, or this was some sort of trick - a regular bombing raid and not just a single plane. They wanted to continue to fight, or negotiate for better terms of surrender. It took the second bombing (and the Soviets breaking their non-aggression pact and declaring war on Japan) to convince the emperor to overrule the hawks and surrender unconditionally. In fact there was even a rebellion by some of those hawks to try to take over the government after the surrender was announced.
There's a tendency for people to compare decisions like these against a vacuum. i.e. To compare the atomic bombings to if the bombs hadn't been dropped but the rest of history proceeded the exact same way. You can't compare to a vacuum like that. For those of us who grew up in countries which were occupied by Japan at the time, we were living in a hell of subjugation, inhumane treatment, and executions. Japanese soldiers forced my grandmother to watch as they raped and killed her sister and niece, all to coerce my grandfather (a doctor) into treating their commanding officer. Any act which might shorten that hell was justifiable. For people in the occupied territories, the atomic bombings meant liberation. Roughly 15% of the people killed in the Hiroshima bombing were Koreans brought over to Japan for slave labor. Aside from the lack of recognition (they're classified as Japanese deaths because Korea didn't exist as a country at the time) Korea has never complained about those deaths. Because as a price of liberation, those deaths were worth it.
10-15 million civilians were killed during the Japanese occupation. That works out to an average of about 150,000 killed by the Japanese each month. If the atomic bombings shortened the war by just 2 months, it was worth it purely on those numbers alone (never mind the number who would've been killed in an invasion of the Japanese mainland). That's the context you have to compare the bombings against. Japan likes to play the "innocent" victim in the atomic bombings, but they weren't innocent. They were guilty as hell of a mass extermination on the order of the Holocaust in Europe. Hastening the end of that extermination was completely justified.
PV solar capacity factor for the U.S. is about 14.5%, about 18.5% for the desert southwest for fixed-mount panels. This is a physical limitation imposed by geometry, the movement of the sun, and typical weather conditions.
The 28% capacity factor the EIA gives for PV solar is for utility-scale PV solar installations. These generally track the sun and/or use concentrators (for some odd reason, capacity factor for PV with concentrators is calculated based on the panel's max generation without a concentrator - i.e. they can theoretically exceed 100% capacity factor).
Power generation for PV solar in the U.S. for 2015 (Jan-Jul) has been 13,841 GWh. Divide that by the 5113.5 hours in 7 months and you get 2.7 GW average production. That's missing the fall and winter months for the latter half of the year so the average generation by December will be slightly lower than that. Doubling the Jan-Jun production yields an annual average of 2.6 GW. If you divide 2.6 GW by the 18 GW of installed capacity, you get a 14.4% capacity factor as expected.
These two new reactors will generate 77% as much power as all of the country's installed PV solar.
It's fascinating watching the mental gymnastics people are going through to try to preserve their desire to have both "it just works" and "I want to control it" coexist.
Android just lets you set a threshold for how many GB (or MB) of cellular data you can use in your billing cycle. When you hit it, it warns you or automatically shuts off cellular data. Yes it's an extra step and requires you to know when you billing cycle starts and what your data cap is, so isn't as simple as "it just works.". But it seems to me it's a whole lot simpler than the convoluted colored pie wedge indicator icon idea you've come up with. What good is knowing what proportion of your current data use is cellular, if you don't know how close you are to your cap?
If you let yourself be pigeonholed by artificial absolute rules (e.g. "in the interest of simplicity, it must just work"), you needlessly limit the possible solutions. Which can result in the simplest solution compliant with your "simplicity" rule being a lot more complicated than the simplest solution which does not comply with your "simplicity" rule. The only absolute rule is that there are no absolute rules (except this one).
Actually, that only happens when there's some "ethical" government regulation prohibiting a competing company from making the drug. Like a patent.
In an "unethical" capitalistic society, if someone buys up all of drug which costs 50 cents per pill to make and tries to sell it for $750, someone else will just start making that drug for 50 cents and try to sell it at $700. Then someone else tries to sell it for $650, then $600, and so on. Until the price comes down to just above 50 cents and the competitor is afraid to undercut the price anymore because then the margin won't be enough to cover his marketing and distribution expenses.
The problem is police situations rarely if ever resolve themselves into black and white instances where an action is "professional" or "thug-like". There's a substantial grey area in between where some observers would interpret the action as appropriate and professional, while others would interpret it as thug-like.
A zero-tolerance policy just means you're going to classify all of these grey areas as black. Even the U.S. Constitution does not go that far, requiring that criminal trials be decided by a jury of only 12 people (not everyone in the country) and only "beyond a reasonable doubt" (not beyond all doubt).
I agree the police are too frequently erring on the overagressive side. But this is a complex social problem without any clear solutions. Anyone who claims otherwise (either pro-police or anti-police) is just letting their personal biases get in the way of an objective analysis of the problem. The solution is mostly going to involve training officers to quickly categorize scenarios, and use pre-approved responses for that particular scenario. Judging them after the fact just invites biased retroactive revision of the policy (e.g. it turns out the subject was black instead of a generic person). This is already done in pretty much all police jurisdictions. The internal police investigations after a controversial incident is mostly about determining if the officer followed the correct procedure he was trained to follow in the particular situation where the incident happened.
And even if you have the best possible system in place, there are still going to be outlier incidents. Where an innocent suspect or an officer is killed because the police followed procedure but the specifics of the scenario subverted basic assumptions about the appropriate trained response.
In fact, the sleazy cost-saving measure would be to fire all the company's EMTs and medical staff, and tell all employees to just call 911 and wait for the city's EMTs to arrive.
Put another way, imagine the universe is a simulation. The programmer didn't want to waste CPU cycles simulating every single atomic particle, so when no meaningful atomic-scale interactions are occurring, the simulation uses a simpler statistical model instead.
When the laser light is striking the atoms in the lattice, the interactions between the light and lattice force the simulation to model every individual atom and photon. So each them are modeled precisely, and no tunneling occurs.
When the laser light is not striking the atoms in the lattice, there's no need to model every (non-)interaction and the simulation reverts to a statistical model. When the laser is turned on again you can locate the position of every atom again. Since the original lattice arrangement was not "saved", the simulation has to generate a new arrangement of atoms in the lattice. This new arrangement is statistically identical to the original, but little details like the positions of individual atoms are not identical. The misplaced atoms appear to have "moved", and we call those movements "tunneling".
Have fun sleeping tonight. -- The Matrix
Enough of the silly Sweden to U.S. comparisons. The vast majority of Sweden's population is concentrated in a few dozen tiny regions (Sweden is the one in the middle). It is not like the U.S. The cities in the U.S. tend to be more spread out instead of tightly grouped, and there are a helluva lot more of them. Economic viability of high speed internet depends on the former, and the number of interconnects needed to connect all of them depends on the latter.
That's not quite so exclusive as it sounds. There are a lot of storms with the same barometer reading
870mm - Typhoon Tip (1979)
875mm - Typhoon June (1975)
875mm - Typhoon Nora (1973)
877mm - Typhoon Ida (1958)
880mm - Typhoon Kit (1966)
880mm - Typhoon Rita (1978)
880mm - Typhoon Vanessa (1984)
880mm - Hurricane Patricia (2015)
The 1970s were a bad decade for storms in the West Pacific.
That's not how I'd interpret those numbers. Amazon is is burning cash (have yet to post a profit) and after 15 years they've managed to increase their online sales to $89 billion. Walmart isn't even trying and they've managed to reach $12.2 billion in online sales - 1/7th Amazon's. Furthermore, the growth of Walmart's retail sales, $486 - $138 - $12.2 = $336 billion, is nearly 4x Amazon's growth in those 15 years.
I love Amazon and I'm a long-time Prime member. But until this story I had no idea growth in retail sales was far outstripping growth in online sales. Looking up some graphs, I see now that the stories I'd been reading about how online sales were "catching up" to retail sales were based on percentage growth, not actual dollar growth. And that as a flat dollar amount, retail sales have in fact been growing far more than online sales.
Some of Amazon's strategic moves that had been head-scratchers now make sense. Like how they agreed to charge sales tax so they could establish warehouses and depots in most states. Or the crazy idea of delivery by drone. They're trying to crack into that retail market with same-day delivery.