The irony is that the argument put forth by both sides about the GM bailout were backwards. When a company goes bankrupt (chapter 7 dissolution, not chapter 11 restructuring), it does not disappear. The parts are sold off to the highest bidder. Things like factories and their workers become part of another car company. The closer the company was to solvency, the more viable its business was and thus a greater percentage of its parts would be absorbed by other companies. But if a company was in a terrible state, then a very small percentage of its parts would be salvaged by other companies.
The left argued that GM needed to be bailed out because it was only barely insolvent, and a small bailout could save x million jobs that would be lost at GM and its suppliers. But if they were just barely insolvent, the the vast majority of those jobs would have survived in other companies after a bankruptcy. And thus no bailout was needed.
The right argued that GM should be allowed to fail because it was an inefficient wreck crippled by union contracts. But if that were true, then bankruptcy would have caused the loss of millions of jobs at GM and its suppliers. And the economy would've had to absorb the shock of its failure (and trickle-down failures among suppliers), in lieu of absorbing the cost of a bailout. So a bailout would probably have been preferable (given the poor state of the economy due to the housing bubble bursting).
So now GM is going back to building gas-guzzlers instead of responsible, (more) environmentally friendly smaller cars.
Companies build what people want, while complying with laws. They follow, they don't lead. Light truck sales have risen dramatically in recent years to nearly 2x car sales. If you look at long-term trend, you see that transition picked up pace in the 1980s. Precisely when tougher CAFE standards kicked in. (The sales data actually goes back to the 1940s, but is not available for free online anymore. It shows the ratio of car to truck sales being relatively constant until the 1970s when CAFE began.)
Americans want to buy big cars. CAFE prevented automakers from legally offering big cars for sale. So Americans looked elsewhere and found trucks were still big. So they began buying trucks instead of cars. The fault here lies with the American public, not car companies.
CAFE is a stupid way to encourage fuel efficiency (especially since it's based on MPG, which is the inverse of fuel efficiency, so it puts most of the compliance pressure on the vehicles which are already most efficient).. If you want to increase fuel efficiency, just crank up the fuel tax on gasoline.
Apple's phones use screens by Samsung or LG, RAM by SK Hynix, flash storage by Toshiba, cellular modem by Qualcomm, battery charger by TI, WiFi/Bluetooth by Murata, cameras by Sony, etc. The only parts Apple makes are the A10 processor and the software. Everything else is stuff made by other companies which anyone can buy to use in their own products. In that sense, aside from the processor and software, cloning an iPhone is relatively simple and does not require any theft of technology.
Also, the median income in China is 18,371 Yuan, or roughly $2,674 per year. You're kidding yourself if you believe the Chinese would be buying $1000 iPhones if it weren't for the availability of cheap knockoffs.
If you buy the album or song, you can download it as an MP3.
If you get the album or song as part of a subscription (Prime or Music Unlimited), you can only download it in encrypted format which requires an Amazon hardware device for playback or the Amazon app. They try to make the download playable only while your subscription is active. You can play it offline to some extent, but I've had problems with it (if your device connects to *any* WiFi network, it assumes it's an internet connection and decides your subscription is expired when it can't reach the Amazon servers to verify your account is active.
Apple is just about where Motorola was after the RAZR crashed and burned. Motorola didn't take the RAZR profits and invest more in R&D and their customers moved on to the next big thing (smartphones). RIM / Blackberry had the same problem.
To be fair, RIM was doing just fine until they lost a patent trial, which cornered them into paying a patent troll $615 million (roughly three years of profit or two years of R&D for them at the time). The patent was later overturned, but the licensing agreement was still valid so they couldn't get their money back. That's what killed them. (The patent in question was for sending email over wireless rather than over a wired network. Never should have been granted.)
Because people have this mistaken belief that taxing corporations means you're not taxing people, and so it somehow decreases the tax burden on people if you tax corporations.
Corporate profit is taxed. The remaining profit is then distributed to shareholders as distributions. If you increase corporate taxes, the shareholders get less money as distributions. If you decrease corporate taxes, the shareholders get more money as distributions. So a tax on corporate profit is the same a tax on shareholder distributions. Likewise, a tax on corporate revenue is the same as a tax on sales to customers or wages to employees.
The problem with tax enforcement comes about because corporations can exist in multiple locations simultaneously. This makes it trivial for them to shift money from one tax jurisdiction to another to evade taxes, and you end up playing a game of whack-a-mole. People can't do that - they can only exist in one country at a time, so can't shift money around as freely between countries. Once you realize the fallacy of the notion that taxing corporations is somehow "better" than taxing people, the solution is simple. Eliminate corporate taxes and convert them into taxes on shareholder distributions instead. If you're worried that the shareholders mostly reside in a different company from where the company is doing most of its sales, then just use sales and income taxes instead - that extracts money from the corporation at the point of sale or from employees working for the corporation in your country.
When you tax a financial transaction, it doesn't matter which side of the transaction you tax it. Whether you tax the giver or the recipient of the money, the net result is the same. The giver (be it a customer or corporation) gives x dollars. y% of it becomes tax revenue. The recipient (whether it be a corporation, shareholder, or employee) gets to keep x dollars minus y%.
Net neutrality is only "necessary" because of the cable monopolies. If the customers don't have a viable alternative ISP they can flee to, the cable monopoly can get away with anti-consumer moves like degrading Netflix until Netflix pays their extortion fee.
The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts. Usually they granted the monopoly in exchange for coverage guarantees - to insure that low-income areas weren't excluded from cable and Internet service. That's where the screwing over of U.S. citizens began. I can assure you it wasn't the GOP pushing for those coverage guarantees. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you think we have cable monopolies because the cable companies are evil, you have cause and effect reversed. Cable companies became evil because government gave them monopolies. That kicked off the whole "power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely" cycle, turning the cable companies evil. Rather than retain the evil companies and try to control their behavior through legislation which usually takes on the order of decades, we should just require competition to be reintroduced into the ISP markets. Once people have a viable choice of ISPs, they will choose the less evil one on their own, usually in a matter of months.
If there's competition, any ISP intentionally degrading Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay their extortion fee will just hemorrhage customers, who will switch to a different ISP who doesn't degrade Netflix. And the beauty is, competition doesn't just work to punish ISPs who violate net neutrality. It works against any anti-customer behavior by ISPs. The genesis of this entire problem is that a bunch of people in government decided they could do a better job choosing an ISP than The People.
The high-end phones are "good enough" that people don't feel the need to upgrade them. The mid- and especially low-end phones still need to be upgraded because they become obsolete more quickly, having started off further behind in capability. They are now the largest growth segment, and the vast majority of it is in China and India. Huawei and Xaiomi have been the primary beneficiaries. It's also traditionally a market segment that Apple has eschewed, so Apple will feel the pinch more than any other smartphone maker.
On a per unit of energy basis, the subsidies for renewables far, far exceed subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear. If you factor in fuel taxes, there's a huge net tax on oil consumption. Zeroing those out to make for "fair play" would put renewables at a monumentally huge disadvantage.
EV owners are going to be hit by the fuel tax portion of this in the coming years. Fuel taxes are used to pay for construction and maintenance of roads. EVs, by virtue of not using gasoline, are not paying for the roads they ride upon. So as the percentage of EVs on the road increases, the amount of money available to build and maintain roads decreases. States are thus experimenting with an extra vehicle registration fee for EVs. As the nationwide average of federal and state gasoline taxes is about 50 cents/gallon, and each car on average consumes about 650 gallons a year, that's an extra $325/yr that EV owners will have to pay to register their car.
Also, forcing people to pay for every gram of CO2 they emit is a tax on breathing.
The solution to this is simple. Fines should not go into the government's general fund. They are punitive penalties for misbehavior against society. They should be put into a separate fund. Then on April 10 when you file you income taxes, the fund should be divided by the number of taxpayers, with each taxpayer receiving an equal share as a generic tax credit. In that way it's paid out directly to the people who were harmed by the initial violation. The government doesn't see a dime of it (giving it as a tax credit just reduces the need to send a check to every taxpayer), so the government's incentive for things like red lights is to time them to maximize safety, rather than to maximize revenue.
Spoken like someone who didn't live through the Arab Oil Embargo. A Democrat President would have done the same thing. The effect of the embargo and subsequent higher oil prices on the U.S. economy already sank the Carter Presidency. The Democrats would not have allowed a repeat.
While not going after the Saudis may have been the morally bankrupt choice, it was the economically cheaper choice even if it did involve spending trillions on wars. Any President who implemented a contrary policy would have been voted out of office the next election, after Saudi retaliation by throttling oil exports would have devastated the U.S. economy more than 9/11 and the wars did. Ultimately, Americans vote based on their economic well-being. Voting based on morality is an option they exercise only when they feel their household is financially secure.
The companies will do whatever the people allow them to get away with. If the people willingly buy products which require proprietary cables, they will design their devices to only work with (expensive) proprietary cables. If the people take a stand and refuse to buy any device with proprietary cables, manufacturers will use unlocked USB-C cables.
So ultimately, it still boils down to boycotting companies like Apple until they start behaving and making consumer-friendly products. You're assuming the mere presence of some Android devices which use proprietary cables makes it equal to Apple. It does not. All Android devices would need to use proprietary cables (thus preventing you from buying a non-proprietary option) before it became like Apple. In fact the presence of some Android devices using proprietary cables is necessary, so manufacturers can clearly see the people (hopefully) choosing non-proprietary devices, thus telling them that non-proprietary is the way to go.
Long before you could earn millions of dollars from playing games. A new hot game would come out and a bunch of us would be bleary-eyed and useless in school for the next week. I even had a few friends drop out of college because they couldn't control their gaming addictions. Heck, the management at our small software company basically wrote off the day's work when a big new game was released, and just let us play with each other that day (a lot of management played too).
Most states (and countries) recognize your right to control your own likeness, and prohibits others from profiting from using your likeness for commercial gain without your permission. Historically that has meant that entertainment TV shows have to get signed model releases from everyone who shows up in the picture. That's why reality shows frequently blur out people - they weren't able to get model releases from those persons. (News TV gets a waiver because the importance of reporting news is judged to override personality rights.)
The question here was does that right to control your likeness extend beyond a visual likeness, to cover facial recognition parameters which uniquely identify you and are then used or sold for profit? This judge decided no.
Not this close. The flyby trajectory past Pluto was selected so Pluto's gravity would redirect New Horizons to Ultima Thule. The spacecraft can only alter its trajectory by using its thrusters now. There was another potential target (pending funding from Congress for a mission extension).a bit more than a year from now, but the "encounter" will probably be distant, and mostly be limited to spectrographic comparison with observations from Earth. But you never know. We could get lucky and discover another KBO along the spacecraft's trajectory close enough to use thrusters for another close flyby.
It's stupid that our system allows this so easily. It should have a cruise control mode that funds at existing levels until budget agreements are made.
The reason our system allows this so easily is to encourage lawmakers to compromise. Because presumably legislation and programs which have already been passed are likely to be more valuable than new legislation up for consideration. So nobody in their right mind would hold existing programs hostage as a ploy to try to get new programs passed.
Unfortunately, control of the country has fallen into the hands of extremist ideologues. That's what a two party system does - shifts power away from the center and towards the extremists. Take a bell curve and the power (bulk of the mass) is in the center. But split the belt curve down the middle, and the two new centers of mass are now closer to the extremes. Thus this sort of funding brinksmanship in order to push radical ideas is becoming the norm, rather than the exception.
Apple's share of the phone market has been below 15% for several years. There are quarters where it blips above (coincides with new iPhone releases), but the average has been below 15%. You probably didn't notice because the media seems extremely reluctant to publish negative news about Apple products. I still remember when iPad market share slipped below 50%, the only mention I found was buried two thirds of the way through a market analysis report.
It's primarily the English-speaking countries (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia), Scandinavia, and Japan (they have an anti-Korea bias, so few Samsung and LG devices sell there) where the iPhone has market share on par with Android. Everywhere else is dominated by Android.
Capturing a 3D field image allows you to reconstruct the photo after it's shot. Do you want a slightly different angle? Focus on a different subject? Wish the camera had been closer or further away (no it's not the same thing as zooming)? The only way to do those things with a 2D camera is to go back to the location and try to recreate the scene so you can re-shoot it. With a 3D camera image, you can correct these errors by recreating it computationally.
I agree that viewing photos in 3D is gimmicky. But the value in having fewer missed shots because you unknowingly did something slightly wrong makes this a technology worth pursuing.
Make public rules too loose, and the result is chaos that renders expensive infrastructure useless. Make public rules too tight, and you restrict personal freedoms of movement and expression. Yes, there is a sweet spot in the middle.
What people need to realize is there is no singular sweet spot. No perfect balance which results in the optimal outcome for all cases. Any level of restriction you pick will be too much in some scenarios, not enough in others. So no matter what sweet spot you pick, nay-sayers will always be able to come up with examples where the current spot fails.
Writing laws based solely on ways the law has failed most recently will just result in the law constantly oscillating back and forth as new incidents pull it one way, then the opposite, over and over. You have to pick a spot, and live with it, accepting that there will always be exceptions where the law fails. If you think it's failing too often, then you can decide to tweak it. But it should never be tweaked in response to just a single outlier incident.
I was stuck for 2 hours on the freeway because someone climbed over the side wall of an overpass. Police were afraid he was going to suicide by jumping into freeway traffic below, so shut down traffic to protect the lives of people driving underneath.
Because nitrites are a natural component of certain vegetables - mainly celery extract. If you ban nitrites, you ban celery and most green vegetables. If you ban artificial nitrites, processed meat packagers will simply use celery extract as a preservative. That's what the "nitrite-free bacon" products do - if you read their list of ingredients, you'll find celery extract listed prominently. Because the natural nitrites in it are used to preserve the cured meat in lieu of artificially produced nitrites. The only difference is the former can be labeled "celery extract" while the latter must be labeled as "nitrties."
At some point you have to accept that lots of naturally-occurring substances can kill you. And stop going on witch hunts against things just because they have a scary name that you don't recognize even though you've been eating, breathing, or rolling around in it all your life.
The only way I can see this working is like how we recommend how much fish you should eat because of the different amounts of mercury they contain. Come up with a list of the maximum amount of a food you should eat in a week due to the nitrites they contain. Bacon, hot dogs, celery, cabbage, carrots, spinach, beets, etc. And publish those as health advisories.
*IF* you're going to flaunt the law and send info your app collects to Facebook without the phone owner's consent, doing it from the phone is stupid. It allows the phone owner to check on the data your app is transmitting, and catch it sending info to Facebook as TFA did.
The smart way to do it would be to have your app send the info to you, then you send it to Facebook directly. That way there's no way for the user to detect that you're sharing data with Facebook. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is what most apps do.
The problem with obtaining insurance is not due to nuclear being unsafe. It's due to a quirk of statistics. The more times you throw the dice (the more individual items you insure), the tighter the distribution gets. The bell curve becomes narrower, and you're more likely to get a result close to the predicted average. So it's easier for the insurance company to figure out what to charge (or for the casino to guarantee a profit) if they're insuring tens of thousands or millions of items. If they want to be 99.9% sure their collected premiums exceed their payouts, they only have to charge a few percent more than their expected payout based on the average (middle of the bell curve).
But there are only 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. With a sample that small, the bell curve ends up very broad. If an insurance company trying to insure them wants to be 99.9% sure they've collected enough money, the premium they have to charge ends up being several hundred or thousand times higher than the average expected payout, instead of just a few percent higher.
Most of the time I run CCleaner on my laptop, I get a message saying it needs to close Edge to clean its cache files. I don't use Edge. So apparently Microsoft has gamed it so Edge runs in the backround even if you don't use it.
That makes me wonder about the tests where Edge "beats" other browsers in power consumption. Maybe they were actually measuring the power consumption of Chrome + Edge, vs only Edge.
the ruling class not wanting to pay for it is holding it back.
The IRS tax stats are readily available. The 'ruling class" (say everyone making over $1 million/yr) only accounts for 13.3% of total gross income (2016, column E).
% of total income - income bracket
0.3% - less than $5,000
0.8% - $5k to $10k
1.4% - $10k to $15k
1.9% - $15k to $20k
2.2% - $20k to $25k
2.4% - $25k to $30k
5.1% - $30k to $40k
5.1% - $40k to $50k
12.1% - $50k to $75k
11.0% - $75k to $100k
25.0% - $100k to $200k
15.5% - $200k to $500k
5.9% - $500k to $1 million
2.3% - $1 million to $1.5 million
1.3% - $1.5 million to $2 million
3.2% - $2 million to $5 million
1.8% - $5 million to $10 million
4.7% - $10 million or more
The bulk of the income in the U.S. is made by the upper middle class and the lower upper class - people making $50k-$500k per year. They're the ones you have to tax if you want to fund any sizable programs. (And no, increasing corporate taxes won't help. Corporate taxes are paid from profits, so higher corporate taxes would reduce the profits distributed to stockholders. So increasing corporate taxes is equivalent to increasing the income tax of those stockholders.)
I mean, we have massive amounts of data that single payer healthcare would be infinitely superior. The latest studies (real ones done by Universities) show $5 trillion savings every 10 years.
The U.S. currently spends $3.5 trillion/yr on health care. A $5 trillion savings over 10 years would knock that down to $3 trillion/yr.
The total gross income of everyone making over $1 million/yr (column D) is only $1.36 trillion/yr. Even if you taxed "the ruling class" at 100%, you'd get less than half the money needed to pay for single payer healthcare. You'd have to confiscate 100% of the income of everyone making a bit over $200k/yr to generate $3 trillion in tax revenue ($200k/yr and up have a gross income of $3.5 trillion).
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The left argued that GM needed to be bailed out because it was only barely insolvent, and a small bailout could save x million jobs that would be lost at GM and its suppliers. But if they were just barely insolvent, the the vast majority of those jobs would have survived in other companies after a bankruptcy. And thus no bailout was needed.
The right argued that GM should be allowed to fail because it was an inefficient wreck crippled by union contracts. But if that were true, then bankruptcy would have caused the loss of millions of jobs at GM and its suppliers. And the economy would've had to absorb the shock of its failure (and trickle-down failures among suppliers), in lieu of absorbing the cost of a bailout. So a bailout would probably have been preferable (given the poor state of the economy due to the housing bubble bursting).
Companies build what people want, while complying with laws. They follow, they don't lead. Light truck sales have risen dramatically in recent years to nearly 2x car sales. If you look at long-term trend, you see that transition picked up pace in the 1980s. Precisely when tougher CAFE standards kicked in. (The sales data actually goes back to the 1940s, but is not available for free online anymore. It shows the ratio of car to truck sales being relatively constant until the 1970s when CAFE began.)
Americans want to buy big cars. CAFE prevented automakers from legally offering big cars for sale. So Americans looked elsewhere and found trucks were still big. So they began buying trucks instead of cars. The fault here lies with the American public, not car companies.
CAFE is a stupid way to encourage fuel efficiency (especially since it's based on MPG, which is the inverse of fuel efficiency, so it puts most of the compliance pressure on the vehicles which are already most efficient).. If you want to increase fuel efficiency, just crank up the fuel tax on gasoline.
Apple's phones use screens by Samsung or LG, RAM by SK Hynix, flash storage by Toshiba, cellular modem by Qualcomm, battery charger by TI, WiFi/Bluetooth by Murata, cameras by Sony, etc. The only parts Apple makes are the A10 processor and the software. Everything else is stuff made by other companies which anyone can buy to use in their own products. In that sense, aside from the processor and software, cloning an iPhone is relatively simple and does not require any theft of technology.
Also, the median income in China is 18,371 Yuan, or roughly $2,674 per year. You're kidding yourself if you believe the Chinese would be buying $1000 iPhones if it weren't for the availability of cheap knockoffs.
If you buy the album or song, you can download it as an MP3.
If you get the album or song as part of a subscription (Prime or Music Unlimited), you can only download it in encrypted format which requires an Amazon hardware device for playback or the Amazon app. They try to make the download playable only while your subscription is active. You can play it offline to some extent, but I've had problems with it (if your device connects to *any* WiFi network, it assumes it's an internet connection and decides your subscription is expired when it can't reach the Amazon servers to verify your account is active.
To be fair, RIM was doing just fine until they lost a patent trial, which cornered them into paying a patent troll $615 million (roughly three years of profit or two years of R&D for them at the time). The patent was later overturned, but the licensing agreement was still valid so they couldn't get their money back. That's what killed them. (The patent in question was for sending email over wireless rather than over a wired network. Never should have been granted.)
Because people have this mistaken belief that taxing corporations means you're not taxing people, and so it somehow decreases the tax burden on people if you tax corporations.
Corporate profit is taxed. The remaining profit is then distributed to shareholders as distributions. If you increase corporate taxes, the shareholders get less money as distributions. If you decrease corporate taxes, the shareholders get more money as distributions. So a tax on corporate profit is the same a tax on shareholder distributions. Likewise, a tax on corporate revenue is the same as a tax on sales to customers or wages to employees.
The problem with tax enforcement comes about because corporations can exist in multiple locations simultaneously. This makes it trivial for them to shift money from one tax jurisdiction to another to evade taxes, and you end up playing a game of whack-a-mole. People can't do that - they can only exist in one country at a time, so can't shift money around as freely between countries. Once you realize the fallacy of the notion that taxing corporations is somehow "better" than taxing people, the solution is simple. Eliminate corporate taxes and convert them into taxes on shareholder distributions instead. If you're worried that the shareholders mostly reside in a different company from where the company is doing most of its sales, then just use sales and income taxes instead - that extracts money from the corporation at the point of sale or from employees working for the corporation in your country.
When you tax a financial transaction, it doesn't matter which side of the transaction you tax it. Whether you tax the giver or the recipient of the money, the net result is the same. The giver (be it a customer or corporation) gives x dollars. y% of it becomes tax revenue. The recipient (whether it be a corporation, shareholder, or employee) gets to keep x dollars minus y%.
Net neutrality is only "necessary" because of the cable monopolies. If the customers don't have a viable alternative ISP they can flee to, the cable monopoly can get away with anti-consumer moves like degrading Netflix until Netflix pays their extortion fee.
The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts. Usually they granted the monopoly in exchange for coverage guarantees - to insure that low-income areas weren't excluded from cable and Internet service. That's where the screwing over of U.S. citizens began. I can assure you it wasn't the GOP pushing for those coverage guarantees. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you think we have cable monopolies because the cable companies are evil, you have cause and effect reversed. Cable companies became evil because government gave them monopolies. That kicked off the whole "power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely" cycle, turning the cable companies evil. Rather than retain the evil companies and try to control their behavior through legislation which usually takes on the order of decades, we should just require competition to be reintroduced into the ISP markets. Once people have a viable choice of ISPs, they will choose the less evil one on their own, usually in a matter of months.
If there's competition, any ISP intentionally degrading Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay their extortion fee will just hemorrhage customers, who will switch to a different ISP who doesn't degrade Netflix. And the beauty is, competition doesn't just work to punish ISPs who violate net neutrality. It works against any anti-customer behavior by ISPs. The genesis of this entire problem is that a bunch of people in government decided they could do a better job choosing an ISP than The People.
The high-end phones are "good enough" that people don't feel the need to upgrade them. The mid- and especially low-end phones still need to be upgraded because they become obsolete more quickly, having started off further behind in capability. They are now the largest growth segment, and the vast majority of it is in China and India. Huawei and Xaiomi have been the primary beneficiaries. It's also traditionally a market segment that Apple has eschewed, so Apple will feel the pinch more than any other smartphone maker.
On a per unit of energy basis, the subsidies for renewables far, far exceed subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear. If you factor in fuel taxes, there's a huge net tax on oil consumption. Zeroing those out to make for "fair play" would put renewables at a monumentally huge disadvantage.
EV owners are going to be hit by the fuel tax portion of this in the coming years. Fuel taxes are used to pay for construction and maintenance of roads. EVs, by virtue of not using gasoline, are not paying for the roads they ride upon. So as the percentage of EVs on the road increases, the amount of money available to build and maintain roads decreases. States are thus experimenting with an extra vehicle registration fee for EVs. As the nationwide average of federal and state gasoline taxes is about 50 cents/gallon, and each car on average consumes about 650 gallons a year, that's an extra $325/yr that EV owners will have to pay to register their car.
Also, forcing people to pay for every gram of CO2 they emit is a tax on breathing.
The solution to this is simple. Fines should not go into the government's general fund. They are punitive penalties for misbehavior against society. They should be put into a separate fund. Then on April 10 when you file you income taxes, the fund should be divided by the number of taxpayers, with each taxpayer receiving an equal share as a generic tax credit. In that way it's paid out directly to the people who were harmed by the initial violation. The government doesn't see a dime of it (giving it as a tax credit just reduces the need to send a check to every taxpayer), so the government's incentive for things like red lights is to time them to maximize safety, rather than to maximize revenue.
Spoken like someone who didn't live through the Arab Oil Embargo. A Democrat President would have done the same thing. The effect of the embargo and subsequent higher oil prices on the U.S. economy already sank the Carter Presidency. The Democrats would not have allowed a repeat.
While not going after the Saudis may have been the morally bankrupt choice, it was the economically cheaper choice even if it did involve spending trillions on wars. Any President who implemented a contrary policy would have been voted out of office the next election, after Saudi retaliation by throttling oil exports would have devastated the U.S. economy more than 9/11 and the wars did. Ultimately, Americans vote based on their economic well-being. Voting based on morality is an option they exercise only when they feel their household is financially secure.
The companies will do whatever the people allow them to get away with. If the people willingly buy products which require proprietary cables, they will design their devices to only work with (expensive) proprietary cables. If the people take a stand and refuse to buy any device with proprietary cables, manufacturers will use unlocked USB-C cables.
So ultimately, it still boils down to boycotting companies like Apple until they start behaving and making consumer-friendly products. You're assuming the mere presence of some Android devices which use proprietary cables makes it equal to Apple. It does not. All Android devices would need to use proprietary cables (thus preventing you from buying a non-proprietary option) before it became like Apple. In fact the presence of some Android devices using proprietary cables is necessary, so manufacturers can clearly see the people (hopefully) choosing non-proprietary devices, thus telling them that non-proprietary is the way to go.
Long before you could earn millions of dollars from playing games. A new hot game would come out and a bunch of us would be bleary-eyed and useless in school for the next week. I even had a few friends drop out of college because they couldn't control their gaming addictions. Heck, the management at our small software company basically wrote off the day's work when a big new game was released, and just let us play with each other that day (a lot of management played too).
Most states (and countries) recognize your right to control your own likeness, and prohibits others from profiting from using your likeness for commercial gain without your permission. Historically that has meant that entertainment TV shows have to get signed model releases from everyone who shows up in the picture. That's why reality shows frequently blur out people - they weren't able to get model releases from those persons. (News TV gets a waiver because the importance of reporting news is judged to override personality rights.)
The question here was does that right to control your likeness extend beyond a visual likeness, to cover facial recognition parameters which uniquely identify you and are then used or sold for profit? This judge decided no.
Not this close. The flyby trajectory past Pluto was selected so Pluto's gravity would redirect New Horizons to Ultima Thule. The spacecraft can only alter its trajectory by using its thrusters now. There was another potential target (pending funding from Congress for a mission extension).a bit more than a year from now, but the "encounter" will probably be distant, and mostly be limited to spectrographic comparison with observations from Earth. But you never know. We could get lucky and discover another KBO along the spacecraft's trajectory close enough to use thrusters for another close flyby.
The reason our system allows this so easily is to encourage lawmakers to compromise. Because presumably legislation and programs which have already been passed are likely to be more valuable than new legislation up for consideration. So nobody in their right mind would hold existing programs hostage as a ploy to try to get new programs passed.
Unfortunately, control of the country has fallen into the hands of extremist ideologues. That's what a two party system does - shifts power away from the center and towards the extremists. Take a bell curve and the power (bulk of the mass) is in the center. But split the belt curve down the middle, and the two new centers of mass are now closer to the extremes. Thus this sort of funding brinksmanship in order to push radical ideas is becoming the norm, rather than the exception.
Apple's share of the phone market has been below 15% for several years. There are quarters where it blips above (coincides with new iPhone releases), but the average has been below 15%. You probably didn't notice because the media seems extremely reluctant to publish negative news about Apple products. I still remember when iPad market share slipped below 50%, the only mention I found was buried two thirds of the way through a market analysis report.
It's primarily the English-speaking countries (U.S., UK, Canada, Australia), Scandinavia, and Japan (they have an anti-Korea bias, so few Samsung and LG devices sell there) where the iPhone has market share on par with Android. Everywhere else is dominated by Android.
Capturing a 3D field image allows you to reconstruct the photo after it's shot. Do you want a slightly different angle? Focus on a different subject? Wish the camera had been closer or further away (no it's not the same thing as zooming)? The only way to do those things with a 2D camera is to go back to the location and try to recreate the scene so you can re-shoot it. With a 3D camera image, you can correct these errors by recreating it computationally.
I agree that viewing photos in 3D is gimmicky. But the value in having fewer missed shots because you unknowingly did something slightly wrong makes this a technology worth pursuing.
What people need to realize is there is no singular sweet spot. No perfect balance which results in the optimal outcome for all cases. Any level of restriction you pick will be too much in some scenarios, not enough in others. So no matter what sweet spot you pick, nay-sayers will always be able to come up with examples where the current spot fails.
Writing laws based solely on ways the law has failed most recently will just result in the law constantly oscillating back and forth as new incidents pull it one way, then the opposite, over and over. You have to pick a spot, and live with it, accepting that there will always be exceptions where the law fails. If you think it's failing too often, then you can decide to tweak it. But it should never be tweaked in response to just a single outlier incident.
I was stuck for 2 hours on the freeway because someone climbed over the side wall of an overpass. Police were afraid he was going to suicide by jumping into freeway traffic below, so shut down traffic to protect the lives of people driving underneath.
Because nitrites are a natural component of certain vegetables - mainly celery extract. If you ban nitrites, you ban celery and most green vegetables. If you ban artificial nitrites, processed meat packagers will simply use celery extract as a preservative. That's what the "nitrite-free bacon" products do - if you read their list of ingredients, you'll find celery extract listed prominently. Because the natural nitrites in it are used to preserve the cured meat in lieu of artificially produced nitrites. The only difference is the former can be labeled "celery extract" while the latter must be labeled as "nitrties."
At some point you have to accept that lots of naturally-occurring substances can kill you. And stop going on witch hunts against things just because they have a scary name that you don't recognize even though you've been eating, breathing, or rolling around in it all your life.
The only way I can see this working is like how we recommend how much fish you should eat because of the different amounts of mercury they contain. Come up with a list of the maximum amount of a food you should eat in a week due to the nitrites they contain. Bacon, hot dogs, celery, cabbage, carrots, spinach, beets, etc. And publish those as health advisories.
*IF* you're going to flaunt the law and send info your app collects to Facebook without the phone owner's consent, doing it from the phone is stupid. It allows the phone owner to check on the data your app is transmitting, and catch it sending info to Facebook as TFA did.
The smart way to do it would be to have your app send the info to you, then you send it to Facebook directly. That way there's no way for the user to detect that you're sharing data with Facebook. I wouldn't at all be surprised if this is what most apps do.
Even factoring in Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power remains the safest power sources man has ever invented. It's safer than wind and solar (helluva lot safer than hydro, which is responsible for the worst power generator-related accident in history - about 170,000 killed, 2 million left homeless).
The problem with obtaining insurance is not due to nuclear being unsafe. It's due to a quirk of statistics. The more times you throw the dice (the more individual items you insure), the tighter the distribution gets. The bell curve becomes narrower, and you're more likely to get a result close to the predicted average. So it's easier for the insurance company to figure out what to charge (or for the casino to guarantee a profit) if they're insuring tens of thousands or millions of items. If they want to be 99.9% sure their collected premiums exceed their payouts, they only have to charge a few percent more than their expected payout based on the average (middle of the bell curve).
But there are only 100 nuclear plants in the U.S. With a sample that small, the bell curve ends up very broad. If an insurance company trying to insure them wants to be 99.9% sure they've collected enough money, the premium they have to charge ends up being several hundred or thousand times higher than the average expected payout, instead of just a few percent higher.
If what other people say and do really bothers you, do something which solves the problem. Simply install an extension which auto-converts Imperial units to metric. You will never have to see Imperial units in your browser again.
Most of the time I run CCleaner on my laptop, I get a message saying it needs to close Edge to clean its cache files. I don't use Edge. So apparently Microsoft has gamed it so Edge runs in the backround even if you don't use it.
That makes me wonder about the tests where Edge "beats" other browsers in power consumption. Maybe they were actually measuring the power consumption of Chrome + Edge, vs only Edge.
The IRS tax stats are readily available. The 'ruling class" (say everyone making over $1 million/yr) only accounts for 13.3% of total gross income (2016, column E).
% of total income - income bracket
0.3% - less than $5,000
0.8% - $5k to $10k
1.4% - $10k to $15k
1.9% - $15k to $20k
2.2% - $20k to $25k
2.4% - $25k to $30k
5.1% - $30k to $40k
5.1% - $40k to $50k
12.1% - $50k to $75k
11.0% - $75k to $100k
25.0% - $100k to $200k
15.5% - $200k to $500k
5.9% - $500k to $1 million
2.3% - $1 million to $1.5 million
1.3% - $1.5 million to $2 million
3.2% - $2 million to $5 million
1.8% - $5 million to $10 million
4.7% - $10 million or more
The bulk of the income in the U.S. is made by the upper middle class and the lower upper class - people making $50k-$500k per year. They're the ones you have to tax if you want to fund any sizable programs. (And no, increasing corporate taxes won't help. Corporate taxes are paid from profits, so higher corporate taxes would reduce the profits distributed to stockholders. So increasing corporate taxes is equivalent to increasing the income tax of those stockholders.)
The U.S. currently spends $3.5 trillion/yr on health care. A $5 trillion savings over 10 years would knock that down to $3 trillion/yr.
The total gross income of everyone making over $1 million/yr (column D) is only $1.36 trillion/yr. Even if you taxed "the ruling class" at 100%, you'd get less than half the money needed to pay for single payer healthcare. You'd have to confiscate 100% of the income of everyone making a bit over $200k/yr to generate $3 trillion in tax revenue ($200k/yr and up have a gross income of $3.5 trillion).