Considering the regularity with which school shootings occur in the US, it would seem that no time is a good time to discuss gun control.
Actually the number of school shootings has been declining. The media just likes to hype it up every time one happens because think of the children! Statistically your kids are more likely to be shot by someone else outside of school than at school. (And they're more likely to kill themselves than be killed by someone else. Table 11 - 1.0 suicides per 100,000, 0.7 homicides per 100,000 for ages 5-14; and 11.1 suicides vs 9.8 homicides per 100,000 for ages 15-24.) But "Your child may be thinking of killing himself!" doesn't elicit as much nail-biting among parents as "Someone is trying to kill your child!", so the media hypes up the latter.
The number of mass shootings OTOH has been increasing. Curiously, that hasn't gotten much press until this incident.
As for gun control, it isn't the pro-gun side which has a problem with discussing it. I'm somewhat pro-gun. I don't use them myself, but I don't have a problem with other people owning or using them. The right to own a gun is explicitly mentioned in our Constitution. If we want gun control, then it's obvious what needs to happen - amend the Constitution to remove that right. I'd probably even support that just because I'm curious what would happen to the statistics if we did it.
But instead we have all these gun control advocates trying to do a run-around of the Constitution just because it's really, really hard to pass a new Constitutional amendment. That's why the gun control debate always goes nowhere: the gun control advocates refuse to tackle the 800 pound gorilla in the room - the Second Amendment. Instead they resort to laws which restrict some types of gun ownership, or makes gun buyers jump through more hoops. It's possible their attempts are even counterproductive - gun ownership is at an all-time high, and gun and ammo sales spike every time politicians start talking about making it harder to get guns.
Nothing to do with end users or content producers and everything to do with locking in publishing monopolies.
That's just one specific expression of a general problem. The general problem is vertical integration where you also sell or give away a product which competes. This results in less competition, restricted consumer choice, and higher prices. Other examples of this general problem are:
Microsoft bundling IE with Windows for free, thus choking off Netscape's main source of revenue when the browser market was just beginning, all so they could control this new method of disseminating information.
Google advertising/pushing their other products on their search engine.
Radio stations (ClearChannel) being in cahoots with various music studios to play only their music (payola).
Cable companies degrading Netflix service to make their pay per view service more desirable.
Cellular service providers locking "your" phone so it will only work with their service, or in Verizon's case refusing to activate phones which are compatible with their network but they don't want people using.
(old one) AT&T trying to block sales of third party phones which were plug compatible with their sockets, instead of having to rent an AT&T phone. The courts slapped them down for this one.
(not quite so old one) Microsoft refusing to release Office for Android or iOS, so they could use it as an incentive for people to switch to Windows Mobile.
Apple prohibiting Google from providing tools to help you transition to Android in the App Store.
Quickbooks and other accounting programs only allowing their payroll service to work with their software.
Unfortunately, there are cases where vertical integration is helpful. (Samsung makes OLED displays which they use in their phones. They also sell the screens to other manufacturers, but they're not very popular so without vertical integration we probably wouldn't see any OLED phone displays.) So just outright banning vertical integration can lead to inefficiencies too. I've been trying to determine some rules or guidelines for predicting when vertical integration is helpful or harmful, but haven't found anything that seems to be universally true.
Virtually everywhere else, if a pedestrian is hit on a roadway and they're NOT in the crosswalk, if they aren't killed then THEY'RE the ones getting a ticket for jay-walking.
And THAT is "right." And I say this as someone who prefers walking when possible.
The pedestrian always has the right of way in California. But which way is "right" is just legal semantics, and ultimately immaterial. San Francisco has some of the steepest hills of any city in the world. If a car is going downhill and a pedestrian suddenly enters the crosswalk, even if the driver immediately slams on the brakes, Mr. Physics is gonna say "nuh uh, this car ain't stopping for ya."
You'd think the reverse situation would balance it out - that it's easier for cars to stop when going uphill and a pedestrian gets in their way. But streets are built so they're level side-to-side. So when a street going uphill intersects with another street, it stops going uphill for the duration of the intersection. Consequently, a car going up a steep hill cannot see pedestrians in the opposite crosswalk until it's almost at the top of the hill.
Polystyrene is mostly air. If you dunk it in a solvent like acetone, it dissolves, releasing the air and decreasing to something like 1% its original volume. Why isn't this considered a viable way to deal with polystyrene trash?
My primary email address is on a domain I own. Whenever I give my email address to a company, I create a new alias of the form company@mydomain.com. That makes it easy for me to drop an email alias if I start getting spam on it. To date I have just shy of 500 aliases. I've had to delete the email aliases for a few minor companies, but all the others have been spam-free - I've only received emails from the companies themselves. With two exceptions. microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com have gotten unsolicited mail from third parties, indicating they sold my email address.
I'll add that if you were the smart kid put into a group of dumb fucks, then it was intentional. To quote Game of Thrones, "he's grooming you for command." The teacher knew you were the smart kid who wouldn't learn anything from the menial work of the activity itself. So he intentionally put you into a position where you'd have the chance to assume a leadership role and direct others on how to do the work. That way you'd learn something new - how to lead and teach others, project coordination, delegating responsibilities. If your response to the situation was to curl up in a ball and do all the work yourself, then you weren't as smart and creative as you think you are. The teacher handed you an opportunity, and instead of taking advantage of it to figure out a new way to deal with the new situation, you crawled back to your tried and true solution - do everything yourself - even though it was completely inappropriate and non-optimal for the situation.
2) Smart kid does all the work because he/she actually wants an "A"
3) Dumb and mediocre kids do fuck all, learn fuck all, and accomplish fuck all, Mostly they just nap or play on their cellphones while the smart kid works.
That's where these group learning projects go off the rails. You're not supposed to do all the work by yourself even if you are the smart kid; especially if you're the smart kid. The point of the exercise is to dole out responsibilities so each member has a role. And finding ways to get each member's contributions to fit together. Unfortunately, most teachers grade it as if it were an independent activity, since they have no way to see how well you're doing the group aspect (unless you're actually doing it in the classroom instead of as homework). That'd be my only complaint about it - it should be limited to the classroom where the teacher can monitor it, never given as homework except at college level..
I'm INTJ (sometimes comes up INTP), and I hated these activities when I was in school, But then I grew up, got a job, got promoted and put in charge of a project, and now I understand what it was all about. If/when you rise to any sort of leadership or management position, you'll understand it too. As the smart kid in the group, you should've found yourself naturally falling into the leadership role (I did, even though I hated it at the time). In simple problem solving terms, the correct solution is to delegate responsibility and coordinate everyone's progress so the group succeeds. if your solution to the situation was to do all the work by yourself, then you weren't as smart as you thought you were, and you're the one who hasn't learned. (Team sports are the same thing. I thought they were stupid when I was in school, and even wrote essays criticizing them. But now I understand why they're in school.)
BTW, if you were able to do all the work yourself and get an A, the teacher did it wrong. The project is supposed to be big enough or structured so that no single member can do it all alone. The classic physical analogy is throwing two people into a well and making them climb out. It's too deep and too wide for either person to climb out on their own. But if one stands on the other's shoulders, or they brace back-to-back and climb with their feet, they can get out.
If we really wanted to stop CC fraud, we could almost eliminate it. It's pretty simple, but we've abandoned this in favor of convenience.
We haven't abandoned it. The credit card companies have. They have successfully shifted all the costs associated with poor security to the merchants. If there's a fraudulent transaction and the merchant can't prove the cardholder actually made the purchase, there's a chargeback and the merchant eats the cost of the fraud. The credit card company pays nothing (their fees and exorbitant interest rates pay for cardholders who are delinquent on paying off their accounts, and profit).
If the credit card companies had to pay for every fraudulent transaction, we would've had iron-clad credit card security back in the 1980s. But instead, because they've shifted the costs to a group (merchants) who have no control over credit card security, there is no pressure to improve credit card security.
Yes, the government does it by moving the cost of compliance to the user (the codes are on the doctor's side, the government just verifies), rather than the other way, where the government would be spending much more on fraud investigations and compliance.
That's what makes it dangerous - you're decoupling the cost of compliance from the benefit of compliance.
Picking a number out of thin air, lets say 10% of medical transactions are fraudulent. The extra work of learning these codes and looking up ones you don't know (nobody is going to memorize all 70k) incurs a cost. For simplicity, let's say it's $1 worth of labor per transaction. Since only 10% of transactions are fraudulent, there's a 10:1 ratio of labor cost per fraud detected/prevented. That is, for each incident of fraud prevented by these codes, the cost of detecting that fraud is using the codes 10x, or $10. Now say the codes are successful and reduce fraud to 0.1%. Now the cost per fraud detected is entering the code 1000x, or $1000. The labor that involves probably far exceeds the cost of the average fraud it's preventing.
Somewhere between those two points is a trade-off point, where the cost of entering those codes begins to exceed the cost of the fraud it's preventing. If the cost of compliance and the benefit of compliance both rest in the same entity, like the government, then that entity will be aware of when that cross-over point happens, and take measures to change the system before it crosses that point in order to reduce costs.
But when you decouple the cost from the benefit, you destroy the mechanism by which such inefficiencies are eliminated from the economy. The hospitals and medical offices complain that the additional labor of having to use all these codes is monumentally wasteful. But all the government sees is the benefit of fraud prevention, and none of the costs associated with that fraud prevention. So they continue to enforce a system which is now costing the economy more money than it's saving by preventing fraud.
Other examples of where costs are (were) decoupled from benefit are:
Pollution - everyone bears the cost but only the polluter benefits.
Overfishing - the entire fishing fleet bears the cost, the lone fisherman exceeding his limit gets all the benefit,
Credit card security - the merchant bears the cost of credit card fraud, the credit card company gains the benefit (they make money even if the transaction was fraudulent because they've made the merchant bear the costs). This is why the state of credit card security is so pitiful.
Mortgage-backed securities - the person buying the security is tricked into bearing the cost because the risk of the subprime mortgages wasn't disclosed, the broker who originally sold the subprime mortgage got the benefit of the fees for selling the mortgage.
Decoupling costs from benefits is in general a really, really bad idea. The few places where it does work (insurance) generally involve robust feedback loops where high or low costs eventually get sent back to the party which can benefit from reducing said costs. I don't see any provisions for feedback loops with these codes.
Does it really take 2%-3% of the dollar value of each transaction to debit one bank account and credit another? That's what you're being indirectly charged when you use a credit card to buy something (the merchant has to pay that much, so they adjust their prices to compensate). Mobile payments had the chance to overthrow the entrenched credit card companies which are enriching themselves by setting up a tollbooth for all electronic transactions. The actual cost is probably somewhere around 0.1%-0.5%. The industry needs a good competitive kick in the pants to get rid of this profiteering. But instead [Android/Apple/Samsung] Pay are just setting themselves up as another way to buy stuff using your credit card, without physically using your credit card.
And no, the credit card does not protect you from fraud. The credit card companies have gamed it so the merchant pays for fraud, so you're already paying for fraud in the purchase price of whatever it is you're buying. The credit card transaction fees and exorbitant interest rates pay for people who become delinquent on their credit card bills and never pay the credit card company back.
China and the European Union have agreed to agree by the end of the year on a working definition for 5G, perhaps the most overused and least understood term in mobile telecommunications.
About the only point of agreement so far is that 5G is what we'll all be building or buying after 4G, so any consensus between the EU and China could be significant.
[...]
The standards bodies that defined 3G and 4G for us, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the 3G Patent Partnership (3GPP), are more measured in their approach.
The ITU plans to decide on its own name for 5G next month. That's likely to be International Mobile Telecommunications system 2020, for the year by which it expects the first equipment will go on sale. It won't get around to choosing a technical standard until February of that year, though.
Around December, 3GPP plans to start a six-month study of the requirements for 5G radio access networks, with a view to submitting a proposed standard to ITU in early 2020.
That slow-but-steady approach makes Monday's 5G agreement between officials from the European Commission and from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology seem almost hasty.
[...]
Neither agreement constitutes an end run around the ITU or 3GPP, though, as the EU, China and South Korea also agreed to promote global standardization in support of the work being done by those two bodies.
In other words, two government bodies which have nothing to do with the actual 5G standard have agreed to agree what 5G is (that is, they won't support different standards). The actual standard itself hasn't been set, and the two bodies which actually do make the standard don't plan to set it until 2020.
Was the whole point of this submission to take a shot at the U.S.? Need I remind you that had the U.S. signed up for the GSM standard, CDMA would've been stillborn and we would likely have 50-200 kbps data speeds today. GSM used TDMA, which allocates bandwidth to phones which aren't even using it. CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, and bandwidth gets distributed evenly between all transmitting phones. CDMA worked so well that by the time 3G rolled around, GSM adopted CDMA (it now uses TDMA only for voice) and nearly every GSM phone in the world also packed a wideband CDMA radio for data. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GMS phone - they had a TDMA radio for voice, a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for both, just in different modes.
(And if you're curious, most LTE implementations use OFDMA. Mathematically it's a lot like CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. The orthogonality is what allows you to pick out a specific phone's signal even though all phones are transmitting simultaneously. The transmissions from other phones just increases the noise floor, so a phone that's not transmitting decreases the noise floor, everyone else's signal to noise ratio improves, and the bandwidth the non-transmitting phone would've used is distributed equally among the phones which are transmitting. TDMA is just giving each phone a timeslice, so only one phone can transmit at a time - or not transmit if it didn't actually need the timeslice.)
Maybe the last 100 years of internal combustion engine evolution? Detroit whined it was impossible until the Japanese and Europeans started selling cars with improved mileage.
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 1970s during the Arab Oil Embargo. Detroit was just giving the consumers what they wanted - bigger cars. The Japanese automakers were unable to compete, so were forced into the niche market of econoboxes. Suddenly gas prices skyrocketed, and the market shifted towards those econoboxes. That's what brought Japanese car companies into prominence. Detroit took a while to re-engineer their product line to be more fuel efficient, by which time Toyota, Honda, and Datsun (Nissan) had become household names with a reputation for reliability.
The U.S. automakers never said higher fuel mileage targets were impossible to meet (at least not until the most recent CAFE standards negotiations). Their complaint has always been that this sort of supply-side market manipulation (regulating car mileage) results in a disconnect between supply and demand. They end up with more econoboxes than they can sell (resulting in their profit margin on those cars dropping to near-zero or even going negative), while the larger cars are impossible to keep on the lots.
If you don't believe that, just look at the trend in car vs light truck sales. (Apologies for the archive.org link - the actual site took the data behind a paywall last year). Light trucks fall into a less stringent fuel efficiency category under CAFE, so the automakers are able to build them bigger like consumers want. Every year from 1931 to 1973, light trucks made up about 12%-20% of total auto sales. Since 1973 when fuel efficiency began to become "important" (CAFE was implemented in 1975), light truck sales have gradually climbed to where they're now over 50% of all personal vehicle sales. The conspiracy theory that people would buy more efficient cars if Detroit would just build them is false. People want big cars even if they get crappy mileage, and will even pay the profit premium Detroit has to tack onto them to subsidize sales of economy cars so they can meet the CAFE fleet standards..
Europe (and Japan and Korea and Canada) actually do this right. They just tax gasoline up the wazoo. That's demand-side market manipulation. Car buyers see the high gas prices, and suddenly they want their car to get good mileage more than they want a bigger car. The automakers then build cars to suit the demand without having to deal with price distortions within their inventory caused by an arbitrary government standard making it a headache to predict how many of each type of car to build. That's what Detroit has been whining about.
I am torn on the issue. The EPA published the test parameters and also outlined what metrics were needed to pass. German engineering wrote the software to specifically pass the test that the EPA required.
If the EPA also had said: "... and under any driving conditions, NOx must never exceed xx%", then the current breed of VW diesel cars fail. AFAIK: the EPA / regulations do not state that.
That's the issue that came up during the last diesel "cheating" case. It involved diesel tractor trailers. The truck makers followed the EPA test guidelines to the letter. They argued that they assumed the EPA was measuring emissions of the engines under specific consistent test conditions, and using that to extrapolate emissions during operation. That is, emissions during operation could exceed emissions during testing, and the EPA standard was set based on the assumption that operational emissions would be higher than testing emissions. Given the wide range of loads and speeds that trucks operate under, this is actually a semi-reasonable argument.
The EPA firmly established that no, the tests were intended to simulate emissions during normal operation, and fined the truck makers $1 billion for "cheating" by following the EPA's tests to the letter. So VW should have known the car was supposed to operate during the test as closely as possible to actual operation.
The evacuation was an inevitable consequence of the accident. The accident killed 1600 people so far.
TFA is actually pretty well written and avoids playing the blame game like you are. It simply points out that inadequate consideration was given to the consequences of an evacuation. That is, the evacuation was done because it was assumed there was a high risk to not evacuating, but nearly zero risk to evacuating. That turned out not to be the case. And that in the future, evacuations shouldn't be assumed to have zero or near-zero risk.
In other words, many of the 1600 deaths were due to the assumption you are making that the evacuation was "inevitable." Poor risk assessment like that is what killed those people, not the accident. A proper risk assessment would've resulted in the most mobile people being evacuated first, since their risk from an evacuation was in fact near-zero. Followed by evacuating more at-risk people as the level of risk of the external threat crystallizes. Remember, Fukushima didn't go kablewie immediately after the tsunami hit. It unfolded over several days. The evacuation was carried out based entirely on proximity to the plant, not other factors. Consequently patients in the ICU were removed from hospitals and put into school gymnasiums. TFA is merely pointing out that those patients would've better been served staying in the hospital even a few days longer until transport to another hospital could be arranged. Instead there was a panicked rush to get everyone away ASAP with no attempt at risk assessment.
What I want is a phone with just one pre-installed app: Setup. This setup app would recommend apps for various things like: App store, email, web, texting, contacts, camera, music, ebooks, etc. It would have recommendations for each, of course, but you could decide what makes sense for you.
If that's what you want, then there's nothing stopping you from doing it. Go grab the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code, make your desired changes, and release it.
What's that? You want someone else to do this for you? Well unless you're paying that someone else, why should they have to do that for you? Google has already done 99.99% of the work by releasing Android as open source. You're complaining because they don't want to do the last 0.01% of work which you apparently don't want to do either?
No one was "forced" to use IE on Windows either, you could freely use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and many others. Still the bundling was hit with a EU anti-trust ruling as an unfair advantage for Microsoft (and to pre-empt; no, the "integration" of IE in Windows was not in any way part of the EU ruling, only the unfair bundling advantage, just like this case).
There was a thriving market for web browsers which was developing in the early days of the web. Netscape (founded by the folks who made NCSA Mosaic) originally cost you $40. Then Microsoft pulled the rug out from that market by bundling IE for free - effectively using profit from Windows to subsidize development of their own browser and preventing any other browser maker from being able to financially compete with it. That's why Microsoft got tagged for anti-trust violations.
The problem isn't the requirement to include Google's other apps. The problem is that they're non-removable.
They're completely removable. Just grab the AOSP release of Android. If you don't want to mess with compiling, the volunteers at CyanogenMod do an excellent job releasing pre-compiled binaries for most devices. Then you can run it sans-Google, or install the Google apps bundle if you wish (a lot of people want Android with the Google apps, but without the crud their carrier force-installs on their phone).
What's that? You don't want to go to all that trouble? Well Google went to all the trouble of making Android and releasing it in both open source and their proprietary versions. They're not charging you any money for their proprietary version - the only price they charge for you being spoon-fed is that the Google apps are bundled with it.
If Android were in fact a monopoly, how exactly would you propose breaking it up? By splitting the OS from the bundled apps. Except Google has already done that by making it open source. I don't know how more anti-monopoly you can get than releasing your entire OS as open source. The only thing stopping anyone from making or releasing their own version of Android without the bundled Google apps is literally their own laziness. What if Microsoft had released the code for Windows as open source? What if Standard Oil had released all the data and plans for finding oil and building your own drilling derrick? What if AT&T had released, free of all copyright and patent encumbrances, all the plans for making phones and switching exchanges which were plug compatible with their network?
The fact that Google releases an open source version of Android in parallel with their own version lets you see what's really going on here. Several companies have tried using AOSP to make their own version of Android - Amazon, Barnes and Noble, many Chinese vendors, and now Blackberry. None have been as successful as Google. That tells you that it isn't Android which is making Google's apps successful. It's Google's apps which are making their version of Android successful. Precisely the opposite of the FTC investigation's premise. Barnes and Noble's customers in particular begged them to add the Google Play store, which they eventually did.
The article explains that at a cost of 19 cents/kwh no one will build any nuclear power plant since solar and wind can be built for much less. So, really, if nuclear isn't subsidized, it isn't going to happen.
The 19 cents/kWh is for a new 1600 MW (net) plant planned in Virginia, which is expected to cost $19 billion.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station units 2 and 3 were built for about $10.3 billion in 2015 dollars, and generated 2x1075 MW = 2150 MW (net). It was decommissioned in 2012 after 29 years in operation, 11 years shy of its license expiration, and 21-31 years shy of its expected lifetime. Its decommissioning fund sits at $4.1 billion, which is more than enough to cover the expected $4.4 billion decommissioning cost (the fund will earn interest over the ~20 years), despite the plant only being operational half as long as planned. The fund came from surcharges paid by customers (a couple cents per kWh) during the decades SONGS was operational.
So the question you really should be asking is, why after 30 years of technological progress and advancement, does it cost 2x as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to build a nuclear plant with only 3/4 the power capacity?
Based on the summary (I haven't read TFA), it's probably a consequences of NHTSA only testing direct frontal collisions - where two cars hit each other exactly head on. The insurance companies in the U.S. saw the folly of that decades ago, and run their own tests which include an offset frontal collision - where two cars hit each other head on but only the two drivers' sides (or passengers' sides) making contact.
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 11 Mbps, then 10 Mbps is not that bad.
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 90 Mbps, then 10 Mbps sucks.
Rank on an arbitrary list is meaningless. If you want to compare against a distribution, compare to the distribution itself. Not some arbitrary index. The distribution is linked in TFA and is vastly more informative than TFA or TFS. In fact it's one of the best interactive data presentations I've ever seen. It should've been linked as TFA, not some article talking about it.
Most of the countries are clustered between 8-18 Mbps. #43 (the previous U.S. rank) is 13 Mbps. If the U.S. were to increase its LTE speed by 50% to 15 Mbps it would jump to #28. And if it were to double its speed to 20 Mbps, it would jump to #12.
The high quality pirated movies are shot by theater employees using a camera on a tripod in the projection room (so the screen isn't distorted from a perfect rectangle) with a direct audio feed (so you get only the movie soundtrack - no people talking or coughing).
So basically all this will do is increase the quality of pirated movies by weeding out the poorly-shot cellphone movies, and give the theater staff some cool toys to play with while they're pirating the movie.
One thing is for certain. No whistles were blown. Which is pretty impressive considering how long this has been going on and the extent of who all must have been in the know.
I don't think many people in VW actually knew about it. VW's behavior in disclosing this is consistent with a company which didn't actually know it was going on. The EPA was investigating this back in May 2014, and VW issued a recall for a software update related to this in Dec 2014. Now, if you knew your cars were cheating on the emissions tests, and you knew the EPA was actively investigating fishy behavior in your emissions, what would you do in the recall? Obviously wipe the complicit software and replace it with new software which made the cars compliant. But that didn't happen.
Look at how this was disclosed. At first VW admitted about half a million cars in the U.S. were affected. Then a couple days later they stated about 11 million cars worldwide were affected. If this cheating was widely known within VW, the cat was out of the bag when they made the announcement about their U.S. cars. They would've acknowledged how many cars worldwide were affected at the same time.
The way they're acting is consistent with a company which genuinely didn't know their engines were cheating. Their attempted software fix in Dec 2014 didn't fix it (probably because they were testing the emissions in a garage and not on the road), nor did it try to cover up any evidence of their cheating. And their announcement is consistent with a company which detected the problem in their U.S. cars, then needed some time to test and confirm the problem also existed in their cars sold elsewhere.
All this points to either an act of deceit committed by and known to only a few if not a single employee. Or even a genuine error which wasn't detected until recently (maybe operating parameters which were supposed to be in effect all the time were erroneously only made active in test mode).
What I've been told about the structure of the EPA regulations is that driving a much more polluting large Diesel pickup truck as your personal vehicle is allowed, but driving a relatively much more efficient and less polluting small European Diesel vehicle is not allowed.
WVU which ran the tests which detected the cheating VW cars also tested a diesel BMW X5. The X5 passed.
The larger diesel trucks use a urea injection system to reduce NOx emissions. The larger size of the truck makes it easier to add the system, and the truck's higher price means the system makes a smaller (relative) increase to the vehicle's purchase price. The brouhaha over VW's EA189 engine was that it (purportedly) complied with NOx emission regulations without the added cost and complexity of a urea injection system. That would've been wonderful if true, but alas it wasn't.
It seems to me that at least some of this finger pointing should go towards the idiots who created the circumstance where the item under test was informed it was under test. That presumes an atmosphere of trust that the very idea of "testing for compliance" does not, and should not, incorporate.
The car needs to know it's under a test. Emissions tests are usually run on a dynamometer. If you don't tell the car it's being tested, its traction control / anti-skid system will go nuts trying to compensate for the drive wheels spinning at full speed while the other wheels are stationary.
The conditions which allowed this to happen go far, far beyond VW. A test by definition simulates the actual driving conditions. The cheating was detected by measuring emissions under actual driving conditions. That raises the question - why not just measure emissions under actual conditions? See, pulling each car off the road and testing it only makes sense when a large number of cars are not in compliance or in borderline compliance (i.e. might drift out of compliance before the next test). If a test costs $45 and 90% of cars are in compliance with emissions standards, you're paying $400 to detect each car out of compliance. And the test is worth it.
Now what happens when 99.9% of cars are in compliance? You're now paying $40,000 to detect each car out of compliance. At that point (actually long before it) the testing isn't cost-effective anymore. California reached this threshold where the testing was no longer worth it in the early 1990s. Most cars were in compliance, and most of the air pollution was caused by about 1 in 1000 cars (mostly older models) which were spewing out hundreds or thousands of times more emissions than a compliant car.
The companies which make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more elegant and cost-effective solution. Stop testing each car every year. Put the emissions measuring equipment at various chokepoints on the road like free off-ramps. The equipment would then sniff the air as each car drove by, and when it detected an excessive amount of emissions it would snap a picture of the violating car's license plate. If a certain set of plates was flagged by multiple measuring stations, the State could then send the owner of that car a letter requiring its emissions be tested.
Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen? The emissions testing itself had become a billion dollar industry. The gas stations and auto mechanics lobbied heavily to keep the mandatory testing in place. For them, a billion dollars a year were on the line. The companies making the detection equipment only stood to make a few tens of millions of dollars selling it to the state. You can guess which side won. So we ended up with testing which wastes money and isn't as effective at detecting cheating as other solutions.
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Actually the number of school shootings has been declining. The media just likes to hype it up every time one happens because think of the children! Statistically your kids are more likely to be shot by someone else outside of school than at school. (And they're more likely to kill themselves than be killed by someone else. Table 11 - 1.0 suicides per 100,000, 0.7 homicides per 100,000 for ages 5-14; and 11.1 suicides vs 9.8 homicides per 100,000 for ages 15-24.) But "Your child may be thinking of killing himself!" doesn't elicit as much nail-biting among parents as "Someone is trying to kill your child!", so the media hypes up the latter.
The number of mass shootings OTOH has been increasing. Curiously, that hasn't gotten much press until this incident.
As for gun control, it isn't the pro-gun side which has a problem with discussing it. I'm somewhat pro-gun. I don't use them myself, but I don't have a problem with other people owning or using them. The right to own a gun is explicitly mentioned in our Constitution. If we want gun control, then it's obvious what needs to happen - amend the Constitution to remove that right. I'd probably even support that just because I'm curious what would happen to the statistics if we did it.
But instead we have all these gun control advocates trying to do a run-around of the Constitution just because it's really, really hard to pass a new Constitutional amendment. That's why the gun control debate always goes nowhere: the gun control advocates refuse to tackle the 800 pound gorilla in the room - the Second Amendment. Instead they resort to laws which restrict some types of gun ownership, or makes gun buyers jump through more hoops. It's possible their attempts are even counterproductive - gun ownership is at an all-time high, and gun and ammo sales spike every time politicians start talking about making it harder to get guns.
That's just one specific expression of a general problem. The general problem is vertical integration where you also sell or give away a product which competes. This results in less competition, restricted consumer choice, and higher prices. Other examples of this general problem are:
Unfortunately, there are cases where vertical integration is helpful. (Samsung makes OLED displays which they use in their phones. They also sell the screens to other manufacturers, but they're not very popular so without vertical integration we probably wouldn't see any OLED phone displays.) So just outright banning vertical integration can lead to inefficiencies too. I've been trying to determine some rules or guidelines for predicting when vertical integration is helpful or harmful, but haven't found anything that seems to be universally true.
The pedestrian always has the right of way in California. But which way is "right" is just legal semantics, and ultimately immaterial. San Francisco has some of the steepest hills of any city in the world. If a car is going downhill and a pedestrian suddenly enters the crosswalk, even if the driver immediately slams on the brakes, Mr. Physics is gonna say "nuh uh, this car ain't stopping for ya."
You'd think the reverse situation would balance it out - that it's easier for cars to stop when going uphill and a pedestrian gets in their way. But streets are built so they're level side-to-side. So when a street going uphill intersects with another street, it stops going uphill for the duration of the intersection. Consequently, a car going up a steep hill cannot see pedestrians in the opposite crosswalk until it's almost at the top of the hill.
Polystyrene is mostly air. If you dunk it in a solvent like acetone, it dissolves, releasing the air and decreasing to something like 1% its original volume. Why isn't this considered a viable way to deal with polystyrene trash?
My primary email address is on a domain I own. Whenever I give my email address to a company, I create a new alias of the form company@mydomain.com. That makes it easy for me to drop an email alias if I start getting spam on it. To date I have just shy of 500 aliases. I've had to delete the email aliases for a few minor companies, but all the others have been spam-free - I've only received emails from the companies themselves. With two exceptions. microsoft@mydomain.com and adobe@mydomain.com have gotten unsolicited mail from third parties, indicating they sold my email address.
I'll add that if you were the smart kid put into a group of dumb fucks, then it was intentional. To quote Game of Thrones, "he's grooming you for command." The teacher knew you were the smart kid who wouldn't learn anything from the menial work of the activity itself. So he intentionally put you into a position where you'd have the chance to assume a leadership role and direct others on how to do the work. That way you'd learn something new - how to lead and teach others, project coordination, delegating responsibilities. If your response to the situation was to curl up in a ball and do all the work yourself, then you weren't as smart and creative as you think you are. The teacher handed you an opportunity, and instead of taking advantage of it to figure out a new way to deal with the new situation, you crawled back to your tried and true solution - do everything yourself - even though it was completely inappropriate and non-optimal for the situation.
That's where these group learning projects go off the rails. You're not supposed to do all the work by yourself even if you are the smart kid; especially if you're the smart kid. The point of the exercise is to dole out responsibilities so each member has a role. And finding ways to get each member's contributions to fit together. Unfortunately, most teachers grade it as if it were an independent activity, since they have no way to see how well you're doing the group aspect (unless you're actually doing it in the classroom instead of as homework). That'd be my only complaint about it - it should be limited to the classroom where the teacher can monitor it, never given as homework except at college level..
I'm INTJ (sometimes comes up INTP), and I hated these activities when I was in school, But then I grew up, got a job, got promoted and put in charge of a project, and now I understand what it was all about. If/when you rise to any sort of leadership or management position, you'll understand it too. As the smart kid in the group, you should've found yourself naturally falling into the leadership role (I did, even though I hated it at the time). In simple problem solving terms, the correct solution is to delegate responsibility and coordinate everyone's progress so the group succeeds. if your solution to the situation was to do all the work by yourself, then you weren't as smart as you thought you were, and you're the one who hasn't learned. (Team sports are the same thing. I thought they were stupid when I was in school, and even wrote essays criticizing them. But now I understand why they're in school.)
BTW, if you were able to do all the work yourself and get an A, the teacher did it wrong. The project is supposed to be big enough or structured so that no single member can do it all alone. The classic physical analogy is throwing two people into a well and making them climb out. It's too deep and too wide for either person to climb out on their own. But if one stands on the other's shoulders, or they brace back-to-back and climb with their feet, they can get out.
We haven't abandoned it. The credit card companies have. They have successfully shifted all the costs associated with poor security to the merchants. If there's a fraudulent transaction and the merchant can't prove the cardholder actually made the purchase, there's a chargeback and the merchant eats the cost of the fraud. The credit card company pays nothing (their fees and exorbitant interest rates pay for cardholders who are delinquent on paying off their accounts, and profit).
If the credit card companies had to pay for every fraudulent transaction, we would've had iron-clad credit card security back in the 1980s. But instead, because they've shifted the costs to a group (merchants) who have no control over credit card security, there is no pressure to improve credit card security.
That's what makes it dangerous - you're decoupling the cost of compliance from the benefit of compliance.
Picking a number out of thin air, lets say 10% of medical transactions are fraudulent. The extra work of learning these codes and looking up ones you don't know (nobody is going to memorize all 70k) incurs a cost. For simplicity, let's say it's $1 worth of labor per transaction. Since only 10% of transactions are fraudulent, there's a 10:1 ratio of labor cost per fraud detected/prevented. That is, for each incident of fraud prevented by these codes, the cost of detecting that fraud is using the codes 10x, or $10. Now say the codes are successful and reduce fraud to 0.1%. Now the cost per fraud detected is entering the code 1000x, or $1000. The labor that involves probably far exceeds the cost of the average fraud it's preventing.
Somewhere between those two points is a trade-off point, where the cost of entering those codes begins to exceed the cost of the fraud it's preventing. If the cost of compliance and the benefit of compliance both rest in the same entity, like the government, then that entity will be aware of when that cross-over point happens, and take measures to change the system before it crosses that point in order to reduce costs.
But when you decouple the cost from the benefit, you destroy the mechanism by which such inefficiencies are eliminated from the economy. The hospitals and medical offices complain that the additional labor of having to use all these codes is monumentally wasteful. But all the government sees is the benefit of fraud prevention, and none of the costs associated with that fraud prevention. So they continue to enforce a system which is now costing the economy more money than it's saving by preventing fraud.
Other examples of where costs are (were) decoupled from benefit are:
Decoupling costs from benefits is in general a really, really bad idea. The few places where it does work (insurance) generally involve robust feedback loops where high or low costs eventually get sent back to the party which can benefit from reducing said costs. I don't see any provisions for feedback loops with these codes.
Does it really take 2%-3% of the dollar value of each transaction to debit one bank account and credit another? That's what you're being indirectly charged when you use a credit card to buy something (the merchant has to pay that much, so they adjust their prices to compensate). Mobile payments had the chance to overthrow the entrenched credit card companies which are enriching themselves by setting up a tollbooth for all electronic transactions. The actual cost is probably somewhere around 0.1%-0.5%. The industry needs a good competitive kick in the pants to get rid of this profiteering. But instead [Android/Apple/Samsung] Pay are just setting themselves up as another way to buy stuff using your credit card, without physically using your credit card.
And no, the credit card does not protect you from fraud. The credit card companies have gamed it so the merchant pays for fraud, so you're already paying for fraud in the purchase price of whatever it is you're buying. The credit card transaction fees and exorbitant interest rates pay for people who become delinquent on their credit card bills and never pay the credit card company back.
In other words, two government bodies which have nothing to do with the actual 5G standard have agreed to agree what 5G is (that is, they won't support different standards). The actual standard itself hasn't been set, and the two bodies which actually do make the standard don't plan to set it until 2020.
Was the whole point of this submission to take a shot at the U.S.? Need I remind you that had the U.S. signed up for the GSM standard, CDMA would've been stillborn and we would likely have 50-200 kbps data speeds today. GSM used TDMA, which allocates bandwidth to phones which aren't even using it. CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously, and bandwidth gets distributed evenly between all transmitting phones. CDMA worked so well that by the time 3G rolled around, GSM adopted CDMA (it now uses TDMA only for voice) and nearly every GSM phone in the world also packed a wideband CDMA radio for data. That's right, CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. That's why you could talk and use data at the same time on a GMS phone - they had a TDMA radio for voice, a wCDMA radio for data. CDMA phones used the same radio for both, just in different modes.
(And if you're curious, most LTE implementations use OFDMA. Mathematically it's a lot like CDMA, except using orthogonal frequencies instead of orthogonal codes. The orthogonality is what allows you to pick out a specific phone's signal even though all phones are transmitting simultaneously. The transmissions from other phones just increases the noise floor, so a phone that's not transmitting decreases the noise floor, everyone else's signal to noise ratio improves, and the bandwidth the non-transmitting phone would've used is distributed equally among the phones which are transmitting. TDMA is just giving each phone a timeslice, so only one phone can transmit at a time - or not transmit if it didn't actually need the timeslice.)
I'm guessing you weren't around in the 1970s during the Arab Oil Embargo. Detroit was just giving the consumers what they wanted - bigger cars. The Japanese automakers were unable to compete, so were forced into the niche market of econoboxes. Suddenly gas prices skyrocketed, and the market shifted towards those econoboxes. That's what brought Japanese car companies into prominence. Detroit took a while to re-engineer their product line to be more fuel efficient, by which time Toyota, Honda, and Datsun (Nissan) had become household names with a reputation for reliability.
The U.S. automakers never said higher fuel mileage targets were impossible to meet (at least not until the most recent CAFE standards negotiations). Their complaint has always been that this sort of supply-side market manipulation (regulating car mileage) results in a disconnect between supply and demand. They end up with more econoboxes than they can sell (resulting in their profit margin on those cars dropping to near-zero or even going negative), while the larger cars are impossible to keep on the lots.
If you don't believe that, just look at the trend in car vs light truck sales. (Apologies for the archive.org link - the actual site took the data behind a paywall last year). Light trucks fall into a less stringent fuel efficiency category under CAFE, so the automakers are able to build them bigger like consumers want. Every year from 1931 to 1973, light trucks made up about 12%-20% of total auto sales. Since 1973 when fuel efficiency began to become "important" (CAFE was implemented in 1975), light truck sales have gradually climbed to where they're now over 50% of all personal vehicle sales. The conspiracy theory that people would buy more efficient cars if Detroit would just build them is false. People want big cars even if they get crappy mileage, and will even pay the profit premium Detroit has to tack onto them to subsidize sales of economy cars so they can meet the CAFE fleet standards..
Europe (and Japan and Korea and Canada) actually do this right. They just tax gasoline up the wazoo. That's demand-side market manipulation. Car buyers see the high gas prices, and suddenly they want their car to get good mileage more than they want a bigger car. The automakers then build cars to suit the demand without having to deal with price distortions within their inventory caused by an arbitrary government standard making it a headache to predict how many of each type of car to build. That's what Detroit has been whining about.
That's the issue that came up during the last diesel "cheating" case. It involved diesel tractor trailers. The truck makers followed the EPA test guidelines to the letter. They argued that they assumed the EPA was measuring emissions of the engines under specific consistent test conditions, and using that to extrapolate emissions during operation. That is, emissions during operation could exceed emissions during testing, and the EPA standard was set based on the assumption that operational emissions would be higher than testing emissions. Given the wide range of loads and speeds that trucks operate under, this is actually a semi-reasonable argument.
The EPA firmly established that no, the tests were intended to simulate emissions during normal operation, and fined the truck makers $1 billion for "cheating" by following the EPA's tests to the letter. So VW should have known the car was supposed to operate during the test as closely as possible to actual operation.
TFA is actually pretty well written and avoids playing the blame game like you are. It simply points out that inadequate consideration was given to the consequences of an evacuation. That is, the evacuation was done because it was assumed there was a high risk to not evacuating, but nearly zero risk to evacuating. That turned out not to be the case. And that in the future, evacuations shouldn't be assumed to have zero or near-zero risk.
In other words, many of the 1600 deaths were due to the assumption you are making that the evacuation was "inevitable." Poor risk assessment like that is what killed those people, not the accident. A proper risk assessment would've resulted in the most mobile people being evacuated first, since their risk from an evacuation was in fact near-zero. Followed by evacuating more at-risk people as the level of risk of the external threat crystallizes. Remember, Fukushima didn't go kablewie immediately after the tsunami hit. It unfolded over several days. The evacuation was carried out based entirely on proximity to the plant, not other factors. Consequently patients in the ICU were removed from hospitals and put into school gymnasiums. TFA is merely pointing out that those patients would've better been served staying in the hospital even a few days longer until transport to another hospital could be arranged. Instead there was a panicked rush to get everyone away ASAP with no attempt at risk assessment.
If that's what you want, then there's nothing stopping you from doing it. Go grab the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code, make your desired changes, and release it.
What's that? You want someone else to do this for you? Well unless you're paying that someone else, why should they have to do that for you? Google has already done 99.99% of the work by releasing Android as open source. You're complaining because they don't want to do the last 0.01% of work which you apparently don't want to do either?
There was a thriving market for web browsers which was developing in the early days of the web. Netscape (founded by the folks who made NCSA Mosaic) originally cost you $40. Then Microsoft pulled the rug out from that market by bundling IE for free - effectively using profit from Windows to subsidize development of their own browser and preventing any other browser maker from being able to financially compete with it. That's why Microsoft got tagged for anti-trust violations.
They're completely removable. Just grab the AOSP release of Android. If you don't want to mess with compiling, the volunteers at CyanogenMod do an excellent job releasing pre-compiled binaries for most devices. Then you can run it sans-Google, or install the Google apps bundle if you wish (a lot of people want Android with the Google apps, but without the crud their carrier force-installs on their phone).
What's that? You don't want to go to all that trouble? Well Google went to all the trouble of making Android and releasing it in both open source and their proprietary versions. They're not charging you any money for their proprietary version - the only price they charge for you being spoon-fed is that the Google apps are bundled with it.
If Android were in fact a monopoly, how exactly would you propose breaking it up? By splitting the OS from the bundled apps. Except Google has already done that by making it open source. I don't know how more anti-monopoly you can get than releasing your entire OS as open source. The only thing stopping anyone from making or releasing their own version of Android without the bundled Google apps is literally their own laziness. What if Microsoft had released the code for Windows as open source? What if Standard Oil had released all the data and plans for finding oil and building your own drilling derrick? What if AT&T had released, free of all copyright and patent encumbrances, all the plans for making phones and switching exchanges which were plug compatible with their network?
The fact that Google releases an open source version of Android in parallel with their own version lets you see what's really going on here. Several companies have tried using AOSP to make their own version of Android - Amazon, Barnes and Noble, many Chinese vendors, and now Blackberry. None have been as successful as Google. That tells you that it isn't Android which is making Google's apps successful. It's Google's apps which are making their version of Android successful. Precisely the opposite of the FTC investigation's premise. Barnes and Noble's customers in particular begged them to add the Google Play store, which they eventually did.
The 19 cents/kWh is for a new 1600 MW (net) plant planned in Virginia, which is expected to cost $19 billion.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station units 2 and 3 were built for about $10.3 billion in 2015 dollars, and generated 2x1075 MW = 2150 MW (net). It was decommissioned in 2012 after 29 years in operation, 11 years shy of its license expiration, and 21-31 years shy of its expected lifetime. Its decommissioning fund sits at $4.1 billion, which is more than enough to cover the expected $4.4 billion decommissioning cost (the fund will earn interest over the ~20 years), despite the plant only being operational half as long as planned. The fund came from surcharges paid by customers (a couple cents per kWh) during the decades SONGS was operational.
So the question you really should be asking is, why after 30 years of technological progress and advancement, does it cost 2x as much in inflation-adjusted dollars to build a nuclear plant with only 3/4 the power capacity?
Based on the summary (I haven't read TFA), it's probably a consequences of NHTSA only testing direct frontal collisions - where two cars hit each other exactly head on. The insurance companies in the U.S. saw the folly of that decades ago, and run their own tests which include an offset frontal collision - where two cars hit each other head on but only the two drivers' sides (or passengers' sides) making contact.
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 11 Mbps, then 10 Mbps is not that bad.
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 90 Mbps, then 10 Mbps sucks.
Rank on an arbitrary list is meaningless. If you want to compare against a distribution, compare to the distribution itself. Not some arbitrary index. The distribution is linked in TFA and is vastly more informative than TFA or TFS. In fact it's one of the best interactive data presentations I've ever seen. It should've been linked as TFA, not some article talking about it.
Most of the countries are clustered between 8-18 Mbps. #43 (the previous U.S. rank) is 13 Mbps. If the U.S. were to increase its LTE speed by 50% to 15 Mbps it would jump to #28. And if it were to double its speed to 20 Mbps, it would jump to #12.
Dear Apple,
You're making $252 profit per iPhone ($18.8 billion / 74.5 million phones). Quit playing these stupid games and just pay the damn $4.70 for an extra 16GB of NAND to bump up the base model to 32GB. It'll decrease your profit by less than 2%.
The high quality pirated movies are shot by theater employees using a camera on a tripod in the projection room (so the screen isn't distorted from a perfect rectangle) with a direct audio feed (so you get only the movie soundtrack - no people talking or coughing).
So basically all this will do is increase the quality of pirated movies by weeding out the poorly-shot cellphone movies, and give the theater staff some cool toys to play with while they're pirating the movie.
I don't think many people in VW actually knew about it. VW's behavior in disclosing this is consistent with a company which didn't actually know it was going on. The EPA was investigating this back in May 2014, and VW issued a recall for a software update related to this in Dec 2014. Now, if you knew your cars were cheating on the emissions tests, and you knew the EPA was actively investigating fishy behavior in your emissions, what would you do in the recall? Obviously wipe the complicit software and replace it with new software which made the cars compliant. But that didn't happen.
Look at how this was disclosed. At first VW admitted about half a million cars in the U.S. were affected. Then a couple days later they stated about 11 million cars worldwide were affected. If this cheating was widely known within VW, the cat was out of the bag when they made the announcement about their U.S. cars. They would've acknowledged how many cars worldwide were affected at the same time.
The way they're acting is consistent with a company which genuinely didn't know their engines were cheating. Their attempted software fix in Dec 2014 didn't fix it (probably because they were testing the emissions in a garage and not on the road), nor did it try to cover up any evidence of their cheating. And their announcement is consistent with a company which detected the problem in their U.S. cars, then needed some time to test and confirm the problem also existed in their cars sold elsewhere.
All this points to either an act of deceit committed by and known to only a few if not a single employee. Or even a genuine error which wasn't detected until recently (maybe operating parameters which were supposed to be in effect all the time were erroneously only made active in test mode).
WVU which ran the tests which detected the cheating VW cars also tested a diesel BMW X5. The X5 passed.
The larger diesel trucks use a urea injection system to reduce NOx emissions. The larger size of the truck makes it easier to add the system, and the truck's higher price means the system makes a smaller (relative) increase to the vehicle's purchase price. The brouhaha over VW's EA189 engine was that it (purportedly) complied with NOx emission regulations without the added cost and complexity of a urea injection system. That would've been wonderful if true, but alas it wasn't.
The car needs to know it's under a test. Emissions tests are usually run on a dynamometer. If you don't tell the car it's being tested, its traction control / anti-skid system will go nuts trying to compensate for the drive wheels spinning at full speed while the other wheels are stationary.
The conditions which allowed this to happen go far, far beyond VW. A test by definition simulates the actual driving conditions. The cheating was detected by measuring emissions under actual driving conditions. That raises the question - why not just measure emissions under actual conditions? See, pulling each car off the road and testing it only makes sense when a large number of cars are not in compliance or in borderline compliance (i.e. might drift out of compliance before the next test). If a test costs $45 and 90% of cars are in compliance with emissions standards, you're paying $400 to detect each car out of compliance. And the test is worth it.
Now what happens when 99.9% of cars are in compliance? You're now paying $40,000 to detect each car out of compliance. At that point (actually long before it) the testing isn't cost-effective anymore. California reached this threshold where the testing was no longer worth it in the early 1990s. Most cars were in compliance, and most of the air pollution was caused by about 1 in 1000 cars (mostly older models) which were spewing out hundreds or thousands of times more emissions than a compliant car.
The companies which make the emissions testing equipment suggested a much more elegant and cost-effective solution. Stop testing each car every year. Put the emissions measuring equipment at various chokepoints on the road like free off-ramps. The equipment would then sniff the air as each car drove by, and when it detected an excessive amount of emissions it would snap a picture of the violating car's license plate. If a certain set of plates was flagged by multiple measuring stations, the State could then send the owner of that car a letter requiring its emissions be tested.
Sounds great! It would've caught the cheating VW cars immediately. So why didn't it happen? The emissions testing itself had become a billion dollar industry. The gas stations and auto mechanics lobbied heavily to keep the mandatory testing in place. For them, a billion dollars a year were on the line. The companies making the detection equipment only stood to make a few tens of millions of dollars selling it to the state. You can guess which side won. So we ended up with testing which wastes money and isn't as effective at detecting cheating as other solutions.