This is what people don't seem to get. Money doesn't have a fixed value. Money is just a representation of productivity, and there's no rule that requires it to be proportional representation. If you magically doubled everyone's bank account and income overnight, it wouldn't double purchasing power. The price of everything would double as well, and purchasing power would remain the same. The value of money would simply be halved, canceling out your doubling of income and savings.
Productivity is the what has real, absolute value. But unlike money, productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed must be produced. So anything which results in a decrease in productivity (like some people choosing not to work) will result in a decrease in average standard of living.
If you want to figure out how to make a UBI work, you need to be asking yourself "How can a UBI increase overall productivity?" If you can figure out a way a UBI can do that, then you can make it work. So far the only way I've been able to come up with for a UBI to increase productivity is if it causes a decrease in crime rate. If the lost productivity recovering from crimes (e.g. replacing stolen goods and repairing damage from burglaries) which don't happen due to a UBI exceeds the lost productivity of people who decide not to work, that would make a UBI a net benefit.
I've always maintained that the way to beat the panopticon companies isn't with ad blockers and privacy legislation. It's to dilute the value of the data they collect by inserting so much fake data that they can no longer sufficiently distinguish real people from the bots.
There's an apocryphal story that after the end of the Cold War, a bunch of the CIA and KGB got together for drinks. The CIA spooks lamented that theirs had been the harder job. The Soviet Union was such a closed society and had so many restrictions on travel that it was virtually impossible for the CIA to get a spy in there, whereas all the KGB had to do was drive to a town next to a military base and mingle with staff from the base eating lunch there. The KGB spooks disagreed and claimed that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that it was virtually impossible for them to separate out fact from fiction. If the National Enquirer ran a story about the military working on a, or some conspiracy theorist reported the military was controlling their brain waves with weather balloons, they had to devote resources to figure out if the stories were real or fake.
I used to work at a hotel. It was common for people to check in with "only 2 people" but then secretly bring in a dozen friends to stay with them and lounge at the pool. In terms of raw numbers of guests who did it it was fairly rare, but it would happen about once a month. The worst ones would trash the rooms and our facility equipment. You wanna know why it costs so much to stay at a hotel, you can thank these people. The thousands of dollars it cost us to repair their damage was paid for via the fees charged to all hotel guests. We're supposed to be able to charge damages to the credit card you used to pay for the room, but they knew what they were doing and usually paid in cash and gave fake names and address/phone numbers.
There's a huge difference between "can do something you couldn't do before, but it requires you to have a tracking device" and "are no longer allowed to do something you used to be able to do freely before, unless you have tracking devices."
The former is an expansion of your choices. You can eschew the new options if you don't like them, like I refuse to use Facebook.
The latter is a reduction of your choices and freedom.
A doorbuster is a deeply discounted item which is only available in limited quantities. The idea is that you use it to entice a lot of people to visit your store, but you only have to sell (at a loss) a small number of your doorbuster item. The people who missed out will browse the store (not wanting to have wasted their time and gas getting there), and hopefully they buy enough stuff to offset your losses on the doorbuster.
With a budget of $125k/yr and an enticement of $5k/yr per person, only 25 people will get the money. I suspect the process of confirming you qualified for the program will be long and dragged out, so you won't actually know if you'll receive the money until long after you've moved to Vermont and set down roots there. That way they're hoping to entice a few thousand people into moving there, while only having to pay 25 of them.
The Verge points out that YouTube "does own a limited license to people's videos, so legally, the company can take Hevesh's content and upload it to its Twitter account.
I'm pretty sure their license allows them to distribute people's videos (necessary for YouTube to function). It does not allow them to edit then redistribute the edited video. That's a copyright violation. Hevesh should be able to sue them for up to $150,000, more if she filed a copy of the video with the U.S. Copyright Office.
The silly thing is that YouTube's sharing link has a tool to allow you to add a start time to a video link (start the video x seconds in). They only had to tweet her original video with the start time set at 20 seconds to skip her intro. The ease with which you can do that and the fact that they didn't would seem to put this violation in the class of willfull and malicious infringement. Someone at YouTube knew exactly what they were doing by manually editing out the first 20 seconds of her video. Which is why the full $150,000 fine could be in play.
In a nutshell, a large part of the Middle East including part of modern-day Turkey used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. One of the less-known facts about WWI was that the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side, which eventually led to its dissolution. The European victors then carved it up with little regard for the cultural and religious boundaries of the indigenous people. The modern countries there - Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel - Palestine, Jordan were drawn with these arbitrary borders. The instability in the region is partially (mostly) due to the cultural borders not coinciding with the political borders. The Kurds (about 40 million of them) were the biggest ethnicity screwed out of a country to call their own. They're spread between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, and all of those countries are paranoid that the Kurds will try to declare independence and secede.
"All circuits busy" is a network overload, not a network failure. Only a fraction of the phones out there will be in use at any given time, so it's wasteful (costs money) to maintain more calling circuits than are likely to be used simultaneously. The vast majority of the time this works and everyone who wants to make a call gets a free circuit. But occasionally when some big shared experience happens (9/11, OJ fleeing police, Challenger explosion, etc), everyone does try to use their phone at the same time. The lucky ones get an open circuit and their call goes through. The unlucky ones get the "all circuits busy" message. The phone system is still working, it's just unable to handle the high volume of calls.
Outages during storms is due to lines physically being severed. No service can survive that. (Well, the Internet can if an alternate route is available. That's why the military invented it in the first place.)
OP is correct that the POTS system is designed to be extremely robust. A basic landline phone would even work during a power failure because they got power from the central office, which was outfitted with battery backups and generators precisely to deal with such emergencies. The commercial building I manage recently got cable Internet, and the cable company pushed their VoIP service as part of a package deal. I advised all the business tenants to keep at least one traditional phone line as a backup, but most of them didn't listen. Then about a half year after cable came in, it went down for 3 days. And when I visited to try to help the tenants as much as I could (forwarding their business calls to their cell phones via the cable company's portal), every one of them told me they'd wished they'd listened to me. The two businesses which had kept their POTS were sitting pretty (one had done so reluctantly because they had signed a 3 year contract just months before cable Internet became available).
The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.
Kindle Music uses the download-but-need-to-verify-subscription-to-play model. I played around with it (a big chunk of its library is included with Amazon Prime). Downloaded a few hundred songs to my Kindle to play offline while fishing on my boat. Supposedly it only needs to phone home once a month to keep the downloads playable. It worked when I tested it at home (turned off WiFi and the songs still played).
But when I got out on the ocean and tried it, every song I'd downloaded via Prime was greyed out. Only the few albums I'd purchased and downloaded were playable. I think it mistakenly thought I had Internet access since I had the Kindle connected to my chartplotter's WiFi to give me a second plotter screen. And when it was unable to contact Amazon over that "Internet connection" to confirm my Prime subscription, it disabled everything I'd downloaded as part of that subscription.
That sort of app behavior tells me they're using a "fail unless everything works perfectly" coding paradigm. Screw that. I'm not gonna waste my time helping them debug it, when the next tiny problem will just cause the same failure. They wanted to use that model for downloaded songs, so it's their problem to figure it out and fix it. I dealt with the problem from my perspective by building up an MP3 collection from old CDs and purchased online music. Those will always play as long as my phone has juice.
I watched a couple streams of Fortnite on YouTube, and thought chopping trees was a silly way of incorporating resource collection into a buildout (i.e. Starcraft). But then I realized it was taking advantage of the learned behavior of a hundred million kids who grew up playing Minecraft. Brilliant. Not for me, but brilliant.
This is an inversion of unemployment rate, not an inversion of average income.
I doubt this is caused by an excess of demand for unskilled workers (waiters, dish washers, burger flippers, etc). It's probably caused by a shortage of unskilled workers. If housing prices have risen so much that it's impossible for unskilled workers to afford to live in those areas, then there won't be enough of them to fill all the jobs requiring little or no skills. The solution is either to build more housing to lower home prices, or offer higher wages for unskilled jobs (which would seem like it could cause an income inversion, but it can't really since it's the skilled workers paying for the goods and services the unskilled workers are providing which creates those unskilled jobs - skilled workers cannot pay more than they make).
The proper thing to do is use all 3 R's: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, not just Recycle on its own. First, we need to reduce how much plastic we use. This might mean making bottles out of something other than plastic. Second, we need to reuse. For example, when you get a plastic grocery bag (if you're not using a canvas one), then use it for other purposes instead of just tossing it. Finally, the remaining plastic that is used, should be recycled so that we don't need as much new plastic.
That's exactly the misconception I'm trying to point out. You're assuming that recycling is always beneficial. I have no problem with reduce and reuse. I practice them myself. But I only recycle if it's expedient.
When you force inefficient recycling, you're forcing us to burn extra energy and labor to recycle. That creates its own pollutants and byproducts with negative impacts on society and the environment. In other words, you're incorrectly comparing recycling vs. not recycling assuming they have the same cost. The proper comparison is recycling vs. doing something else with the energy, money, and labor that would've gone into recycling. As manufacturing new plastics from oil seems to be substantially cheaper (requires less energy, money, and labor) than recycling used plastics, the expedient thing to do would seem to be to simply bury waste plastic rather than waste resources trying to recycle it. As far as I can tell there's very little harm done by burying it since (1) it's almost completely non-biodegradable, and (2) it originally came from underground in the first place.
If you really believe that recycling plastics will become cost-effective in the future, you can require it be buried separately in specially designated landfills. And in the future it will become a resource mine for a more cost-effective plastic recycling plant. But forcing money-wasting recycling of plastics today just burns extra energy (creating all its associated emissions), costs extra money (which could be used for more worthwhile projects), and wastes labor.
In the long run, Medicare will probably be gradually extended to cover everyone, which will give us Single-Payer by default.
The problem isn't that the U.S. doesn't have a single-payer system. Lost in the debate over Obamacare was the fact that in 2006, U.S. government spending on health care (i.e. excluding private and insurance spending) was higher than Canada's on a per capita basis. If a single-payer system was the panacea people thought it was, the U.S. government was already spending enough on health care to replicate Canada's single-payer system pre-Obamacare. Obama could have just duplicated Canada's system and prices exactly and set that up here, converting all existing government medical expenditures (like Medicare) over to the new system. And if it were more efficient, it would supplant the existing system via natural economic evolution.
It's still the case today, but people are so enamored with the idea that a single-payer system will solve all our woes that they don't bother actually looking at the data. The problem is something (or somethings) else driving up health care costs here.
Water bottles are made from plastic. Plastic is made from oil. Oil comes from the ground. The excess carbon in the oil we pump up from the ground is becoming CO2 when the oil is burned, causing our climate problems
If we bury the used plastic bottles in landfills, we're just sequestering that carbon back underground. If the plastic is virtually impossible for bacteria to biodegrade, that means it won't be converted into methane or CO2 by bacteria in the landfill, thus guaranteeing that the carbon remains sequestered underground. Where it originally came from.
People have become so conditioned to the idea that "recycling is good for the Earth!", that they no longer stop to think about when recycling might be unnecessary. If, as environmentalists wish, we stop using oil for fuel, then that will mean there will be plenty of oil left to manufacture plastics. So rather than waste a lot of extra energy sorting it and recycling it, just put it back underground where we originally got it from. Use new oil to make new plastics.
The problem is plastics which don't end up in landfills, and instead end up littering our streets, wilderness, rivers, and oceans. So it's pointless requiring companies to come up with new ways to recycle plastic when the problem is the plastic isn't collected in the first place - you can't recycle what isn't collected. All you need to solve the disposal problem is to increase the deposit on each bottle, to encourage the buyer to properly disposes of it after use.
A deposit also encourages homeless and low income people to collect and disposes of bottles which were thrown away improperly. If you think about it, bottle deposits are a way to give financial assistance to these people at zero cost to the government. It's paid for by people who choose to throw their bottles and cans away on the ground, instead of taking them to a collection center. Deposits are win-win-win, with the only losers being people who litter.
Because I sure as hell couldn't have done it. But it's a bit different doing it today, with GPS telling you exactly where to go, and a satellite phone to bring in the air cavalry if something should go wrong. Early explorers had to navigate with a sextant, hoping they got their times and calculations right so they'd hit the next supply cache. Miss it and They Would Die.
Scott's party died a few miles from a supply depot, and had wasted considerably time and strength searching for previous caches. Likewise if someone broke a leg, or a sled runner came off and couldn't be fixed, They Would Die.
Books are software. Unless you're a collector, their value is in the text and illustrations they contain (software). Not the physical paper and glue which binds them. Same goes for microfiche, audio CDs, DVDs, and video game cartridges. They're all software, and their physical form is a consequence of the technological limitations of past generations, not expedience.
That's the real mental hump we need to get over. Stop thinking of libraries as a place where you can borrow books (and other software). Start thinking of them as places where you can get a copy of archived software. Once you realize this, you realize that a library's roles of archivist and distributor are one and the same. The library need to have a copy of everything if it wants to allow people to obtain a copy from them. Unfortunately, the copyright industry has a vested interest in preventing this sort of mentality (copy instead of borrow/buy) from taking hold among the population.
There's this widespread mistaken belief that radiation is not normal, and is only created by nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Radiation is completely normal and is everywhere around you.
The highest radiation dose most people receive in a year actually comes from their own bodies. There's a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium, and our nervous system needs potassium to function. Likewise, foods high in potassium can give you an elevated radiation dose. The radiation sensors at our border checkpoints designed to detect terrorists trying to smuggle in a dirty bomb are forever being triggered by cat litter, tiles, and foods high in potassium like bananas, nuts, etc..
After that comes rocks - mainly granite, but also things like beach sand. They have trace amounts of natural uranium which is radioactive. Having granite countertops in your kitchen substantially increases your annual radiation dose. The radon which can build up in your basement if you live in the mountains comes from rocks. Radon is one of the byproducts of uranium's natural decay chain.
After that is cosmic rays from space. Living at higher altitudes increases your exposure to this radiation source, since there's less atmosphere above you to absorb it. A transcontinental flight exposes you to about as much additional radiation as a medical x-ray. All the people who fled Japan after Fukushima by flying home unwittingly subjected themselves to more radiation during the flight than they would have received from Fukushima if they had just stayed in Japan.
Anyhow, uranium is water soluble. As a result, seawater has a much higher concentration of natural radionuclides than you normally encounter on land. So if you're that paranoid about radiation, you shouldn't swim in the ocean (you shouldn't even go to the beach, where the sand and sun will irradiate you). The increase in radioactivity from pre- to post-Fukushima is tiny compared to natural levels. The reason we know it's coming from Fukushima is not because the water has suddenly become radioactive. It's because the radioactivity is coming from certain isotopes which have short half-lives so have long since disappeared as a natural radiation source. Fukushima was the only recent event which created a bunch of those short-lived isotopes, so we know that if we detect radiation from those isotopes, that they must have come from Fukushima.
The high mercury content is in the meat from toothed whales - dolphins, porpoises, false killer whales, etc. - which aren't as well-protected by the IWC. They eat fish, which allows the mercury to build up over several tiers of the food chain, causing mercury to concentrate. It's the same reason we have warnings about eating too much tuna - they're on top of the food chain too so have built up high concentrations of mercury. (The mercury originally came from gold mining, but nowadays mostly comes from burning coal.)
The whales affected by resuming commercial whaling are baleen whales. Those are filter feeders which only occasionally eat fish. They primarily eat plankton and krill, which are very low on the food chain so there's been no chance for mercury to build up. Their meat will be considerably if not acceptably lower in mercury content.
So from a mercury contamination standpoint, the resumption of commercial whaling would actually mean the "whale meat" a Japanese consumer buys in a store would on average have less mercury. That could potentially make it more palatable to Japanese, schools, and the poor.
Your timeline is skewed. Active Desktop took place in Windows 98 with IE4. Then you go with
He left out the greater context in which this was happening. Netscape was the dominant browser from 1993-1998. You had to pay to buy Netscape during this time, just like buying Photoshop or Office. IE wasn't included as part of Win95, and as a standalone product it wasn't very successful.
Gates didn't believe in the Internet. Microsoft had bet on the CompuServe/GEnie/AOL model of global networking - where people paid to dialup to portals set up and controlled by one company. MSNBC was originally Microsoft's (and NBC's joint) foray into this model. That's right, you initially had to subscribe to MSNBC in order to view its content. As a result, Windows was late getting a TCP/IP stack (necessary for Internet) built in (it was included with Win95). Microsoft was very much a follower on everything happening on the Internet, like the web (which became big in 1994). Microsoft couldn't stomach the idea of someone else controlling the web, so they went for the jugular. They included IE for free with Win98, thus choking off Netscape's revenue stream. What Microsoft had done to Stacker was still fresh in everyone's minds. (Stac came up with the idea of disk compression. When Microsoft was unable to come to a licensing agreement with Stac, they built their own version and included it for free with MS-DOS, thus killing off the sale-ability of Stac's product.)
Bundling IE with Win98 for free would of course would raise the same legal issues the Stacker case raised - whether Microsoft should be allowed to use profits from DOS/Windows to subsidize development of products which competed with existing products which ran on DOS/Windows. There was a possibility a court would order Microsoft to unbundle IE and sell it separately in competition with Netscape. So to stave off that possibility, they did everything they could to tie IE as deeply as they could within Windows. That way they could honestly argue in court that it was impossible to unbundle IE from Windows.
And that deep embedding to prevent a court from thwarting their ploy to kill off Netscape is why an IE patch today can make Windows unbootable.
The COM and ActiveX stuff is relevant because Microsoft realized that if the world moved from DOS/Windows apps to generic web-based apps which could run on any OS as long as it had a compliant browser, nobody would pay for DOS/Windows anymore. So they set out to take control of web-based apps with ActiveX. (As it turned out, the performance hit for running a web-based app was big enough that it didn't really become competitive with native OSes until the mid-2000s, about the time Flash and Java came into their own.)
I really think this is Amazon's biggest weakness. If some competing online shopping site comes around with a more effective search, I'd switch. It's why I still buy most of my computer components from Newegg instead of Amazon. Newegg's search works, and helps you easily eliminate products you're not looking for. (You just have to make sure to set Newegg as the seller to filter out all the crap reseller offerings.)
If only iPhone owners had a way to revert to an older version of iOS. But Apple in their infinite wisdom decided the extra security (and lower maintenance) of forcing everyone onto the same version was more important than having a safety net in case of a screwed up update. (I'd throw in a barb at Microsoft and Windows 10's automatic Updates here, but at least they still allow you to uninstall select updates that cause problems.)
Republicans love giving power to government for law enforcement purposes. Democrats love giving power to government for social justice purposes. Libertarians are against big government in case it ever becomes corrupt, but were always ridiculed because "that could never happen here." Well, now do you believe it could happen here? The only real check on authoritarianism is to prevent government from amassing that much power in the first place.
Yes a benevolent oligarchy or a benevolent dictatorship can be more effective than a democracy. But the tradeoff is a higher risk of turning into an authoritarian oligarchy or dictatorship. The Libertarian argument is that it's better to just suffer with less effective government, than to give government more power and risk it turning authoritarian and abusing that power. Every time you the thought "there aught to be a law against that" crosses your mind, the next thing you should think about is how such a law could be abused by the government. Only after you've considered that full range of possibilities can you impartially decide if things really would be better with such a law. Otherwise you end up like China, which has thousands of behavioral laws that are never enforced. Unless you piss off the Communist leadership, in which case they throw the book at you and either send you to a labor camp or chop off your head.
Everest could be climbed using the financial resources of a single person who felt "because it's there" was a good enough reason. Sending people to Mars will take considerably more resources, If you can find enough like-minded people to donate enough money to fund a manned Mars mission, then go for it! I on the other hand am content with our robotic rovers and satellites.
We also need to get off this planet before we are wiped out by an asteroid or something. Doing that in large numbers and creating a self sufficient colony on some other rock (preferably circling another star) will be very hard, a toe hold on Mars would be a great start.
If you can produce sufficient life support facilities to keep a colony alive on Mars, you can use the exact same life support facilities to keep a colony alive on Earth after a catastrophic asteroid impact. Minus the enormous transport costs. Seriously, the atmospheric, temperature, and radiation conditions on Mars make a nuclear winter on Earth look like a walk in the park.
I would contend that a single astronaut on Mars can do far more science than even 1000 robots.
While that's true, the fact that it takes more than 1000x the weight in support infrastructure and fuel to provide life support for astronauts (not to mention return trip costs) means we should keep sending robots.
Slashdot Mirror
This is what people don't seem to get. Money doesn't have a fixed value. Money is just a representation of productivity, and there's no rule that requires it to be proportional representation. If you magically doubled everyone's bank account and income overnight, it wouldn't double purchasing power. The price of everything would double as well, and purchasing power would remain the same. The value of money would simply be halved, canceling out your doubling of income and savings.
Productivity is the what has real, absolute value. But unlike money, productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed must be produced. So anything which results in a decrease in productivity (like some people choosing not to work) will result in a decrease in average standard of living.
If you want to figure out how to make a UBI work, you need to be asking yourself "How can a UBI increase overall productivity?" If you can figure out a way a UBI can do that, then you can make it work. So far the only way I've been able to come up with for a UBI to increase productivity is if it causes a decrease in crime rate. If the lost productivity recovering from crimes (e.g. replacing stolen goods and repairing damage from burglaries) which don't happen due to a UBI exceeds the lost productivity of people who decide not to work, that would make a UBI a net benefit.
I've always maintained that the way to beat the panopticon companies isn't with ad blockers and privacy legislation. It's to dilute the value of the data they collect by inserting so much fake data that they can no longer sufficiently distinguish real people from the bots.
There's an apocryphal story that after the end of the Cold War, a bunch of the CIA and KGB got together for drinks. The CIA spooks lamented that theirs had been the harder job. The Soviet Union was such a closed society and had so many restrictions on travel that it was virtually impossible for the CIA to get a spy in there, whereas all the KGB had to do was drive to a town next to a military base and mingle with staff from the base eating lunch there. The KGB spooks disagreed and claimed that theirs had been the harder job. The U.S. produced so much information that it was virtually impossible for them to separate out fact from fiction. If the National Enquirer ran a story about the military working on a, or some conspiracy theorist reported the military was controlling their brain waves with weather balloons, they had to devote resources to figure out if the stories were real or fake.
I used to work at a hotel. It was common for people to check in with "only 2 people" but then secretly bring in a dozen friends to stay with them and lounge at the pool. In terms of raw numbers of guests who did it it was fairly rare, but it would happen about once a month. The worst ones would trash the rooms and our facility equipment. You wanna know why it costs so much to stay at a hotel, you can thank these people. The thousands of dollars it cost us to repair their damage was paid for via the fees charged to all hotel guests. We're supposed to be able to charge damages to the credit card you used to pay for the room, but they knew what they were doing and usually paid in cash and gave fake names and address/phone numbers.
That means 25% of Canadians are living without a smartphone. Meaning that yes, you could in fact live without a smartphone.
Next question please?
There's a huge difference between "can do something you couldn't do before, but it requires you to have a tracking device" and "are no longer allowed to do something you used to be able to do freely before, unless you have tracking devices."
The former is an expansion of your choices. You can eschew the new options if you don't like them, like I refuse to use Facebook.
The latter is a reduction of your choices and freedom.
A doorbuster is a deeply discounted item which is only available in limited quantities. The idea is that you use it to entice a lot of people to visit your store, but you only have to sell (at a loss) a small number of your doorbuster item. The people who missed out will browse the store (not wanting to have wasted their time and gas getting there), and hopefully they buy enough stuff to offset your losses on the doorbuster.
With a budget of $125k/yr and an enticement of $5k/yr per person, only 25 people will get the money. I suspect the process of confirming you qualified for the program will be long and dragged out, so you won't actually know if you'll receive the money until long after you've moved to Vermont and set down roots there. That way they're hoping to entice a few thousand people into moving there, while only having to pay 25 of them.
I'm pretty sure their license allows them to distribute people's videos (necessary for YouTube to function). It does not allow them to edit then redistribute the edited video. That's a copyright violation. Hevesh should be able to sue them for up to $150,000, more if she filed a copy of the video with the U.S. Copyright Office.
The silly thing is that YouTube's sharing link has a tool to allow you to add a start time to a video link (start the video x seconds in). They only had to tweet her original video with the start time set at 20 seconds to skip her intro. The ease with which you can do that and the fact that they didn't would seem to put this violation in the class of willfull and malicious infringement. Someone at YouTube knew exactly what they were doing by manually editing out the first 20 seconds of her video. Which is why the full $150,000 fine could be in play.
In a nutshell, a large part of the Middle East including part of modern-day Turkey used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. One of the less-known facts about WWI was that the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side, which eventually led to its dissolution. The European victors then carved it up with little regard for the cultural and religious boundaries of the indigenous people. The modern countries there - Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel - Palestine, Jordan were drawn with these arbitrary borders. The instability in the region is partially (mostly) due to the cultural borders not coinciding with the political borders. The Kurds (about 40 million of them) were the biggest ethnicity screwed out of a country to call their own. They're spread between Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey, and all of those countries are paranoid that the Kurds will try to declare independence and secede.
"All circuits busy" is a network overload, not a network failure. Only a fraction of the phones out there will be in use at any given time, so it's wasteful (costs money) to maintain more calling circuits than are likely to be used simultaneously. The vast majority of the time this works and everyone who wants to make a call gets a free circuit. But occasionally when some big shared experience happens (9/11, OJ fleeing police, Challenger explosion, etc), everyone does try to use their phone at the same time. The lucky ones get an open circuit and their call goes through. The unlucky ones get the "all circuits busy" message. The phone system is still working, it's just unable to handle the high volume of calls.
Outages during storms is due to lines physically being severed. No service can survive that. (Well, the Internet can if an alternate route is available. That's why the military invented it in the first place.)
OP is correct that the POTS system is designed to be extremely robust. A basic landline phone would even work during a power failure because they got power from the central office, which was outfitted with battery backups and generators precisely to deal with such emergencies. The commercial building I manage recently got cable Internet, and the cable company pushed their VoIP service as part of a package deal. I advised all the business tenants to keep at least one traditional phone line as a backup, but most of them didn't listen. Then about a half year after cable came in, it went down for 3 days. And when I visited to try to help the tenants as much as I could (forwarding their business calls to their cell phones via the cable company's portal), every one of them told me they'd wished they'd listened to me. The two businesses which had kept their POTS were sitting pretty (one had done so reluctantly because they had signed a 3 year contract just months before cable Internet became available).
Kindle Music uses the download-but-need-to-verify-subscription-to-play model. I played around with it (a big chunk of its library is included with Amazon Prime). Downloaded a few hundred songs to my Kindle to play offline while fishing on my boat. Supposedly it only needs to phone home once a month to keep the downloads playable. It worked when I tested it at home (turned off WiFi and the songs still played).
But when I got out on the ocean and tried it, every song I'd downloaded via Prime was greyed out. Only the few albums I'd purchased and downloaded were playable. I think it mistakenly thought I had Internet access since I had the Kindle connected to my chartplotter's WiFi to give me a second plotter screen. And when it was unable to contact Amazon over that "Internet connection" to confirm my Prime subscription, it disabled everything I'd downloaded as part of that subscription.
That sort of app behavior tells me they're using a "fail unless everything works perfectly" coding paradigm. Screw that. I'm not gonna waste my time helping them debug it, when the next tiny problem will just cause the same failure. They wanted to use that model for downloaded songs, so it's their problem to figure it out and fix it. I dealt with the problem from my perspective by building up an MP3 collection from old CDs and purchased online music. Those will always play as long as my phone has juice.
I watched a couple streams of Fortnite on YouTube, and thought chopping trees was a silly way of incorporating resource collection into a buildout (i.e. Starcraft). But then I realized it was taking advantage of the learned behavior of a hundred million kids who grew up playing Minecraft. Brilliant. Not for me, but brilliant.
This is an inversion of unemployment rate, not an inversion of average income.
I doubt this is caused by an excess of demand for unskilled workers (waiters, dish washers, burger flippers, etc). It's probably caused by a shortage of unskilled workers. If housing prices have risen so much that it's impossible for unskilled workers to afford to live in those areas, then there won't be enough of them to fill all the jobs requiring little or no skills. The solution is either to build more housing to lower home prices, or offer higher wages for unskilled jobs (which would seem like it could cause an income inversion, but it can't really since it's the skilled workers paying for the goods and services the unskilled workers are providing which creates those unskilled jobs - skilled workers cannot pay more than they make).
That's exactly the misconception I'm trying to point out. You're assuming that recycling is always beneficial. I have no problem with reduce and reuse. I practice them myself. But I only recycle if it's expedient.
When you force inefficient recycling, you're forcing us to burn extra energy and labor to recycle. That creates its own pollutants and byproducts with negative impacts on society and the environment. In other words, you're incorrectly comparing recycling vs. not recycling assuming they have the same cost. The proper comparison is recycling vs. doing something else with the energy, money, and labor that would've gone into recycling. As manufacturing new plastics from oil seems to be substantially cheaper (requires less energy, money, and labor) than recycling used plastics, the expedient thing to do would seem to be to simply bury waste plastic rather than waste resources trying to recycle it. As far as I can tell there's very little harm done by burying it since (1) it's almost completely non-biodegradable, and (2) it originally came from underground in the first place.
If you really believe that recycling plastics will become cost-effective in the future, you can require it be buried separately in specially designated landfills. And in the future it will become a resource mine for a more cost-effective plastic recycling plant. But forcing money-wasting recycling of plastics today just burns extra energy (creating all its associated emissions), costs extra money (which could be used for more worthwhile projects), and wastes labor.
The problem isn't that the U.S. doesn't have a single-payer system. Lost in the debate over Obamacare was the fact that in 2006, U.S. government spending on health care (i.e. excluding private and insurance spending) was higher than Canada's on a per capita basis. If a single-payer system was the panacea people thought it was, the U.S. government was already spending enough on health care to replicate Canada's single-payer system pre-Obamacare. Obama could have just duplicated Canada's system and prices exactly and set that up here, converting all existing government medical expenditures (like Medicare) over to the new system. And if it were more efficient, it would supplant the existing system via natural economic evolution.
It's still the case today, but people are so enamored with the idea that a single-payer system will solve all our woes that they don't bother actually looking at the data. The problem is something (or somethings) else driving up health care costs here.
Water bottles are made from plastic. Plastic is made from oil. Oil comes from the ground. The excess carbon in the oil we pump up from the ground is becoming CO2 when the oil is burned, causing our climate problems
If we bury the used plastic bottles in landfills, we're just sequestering that carbon back underground. If the plastic is virtually impossible for bacteria to biodegrade, that means it won't be converted into methane or CO2 by bacteria in the landfill, thus guaranteeing that the carbon remains sequestered underground. Where it originally came from.
People have become so conditioned to the idea that "recycling is good for the Earth!", that they no longer stop to think about when recycling might be unnecessary. If, as environmentalists wish, we stop using oil for fuel, then that will mean there will be plenty of oil left to manufacture plastics. So rather than waste a lot of extra energy sorting it and recycling it, just put it back underground where we originally got it from. Use new oil to make new plastics.
The problem is plastics which don't end up in landfills, and instead end up littering our streets, wilderness, rivers, and oceans. So it's pointless requiring companies to come up with new ways to recycle plastic when the problem is the plastic isn't collected in the first place - you can't recycle what isn't collected. All you need to solve the disposal problem is to increase the deposit on each bottle, to encourage the buyer to properly disposes of it after use.
A deposit also encourages homeless and low income people to collect and disposes of bottles which were thrown away improperly. If you think about it, bottle deposits are a way to give financial assistance to these people at zero cost to the government. It's paid for by people who choose to throw their bottles and cans away on the ground, instead of taking them to a collection center. Deposits are win-win-win, with the only losers being people who litter.
Because I sure as hell couldn't have done it. But it's a bit different doing it today, with GPS telling you exactly where to go, and a satellite phone to bring in the air cavalry if something should go wrong. Early explorers had to navigate with a sextant, hoping they got their times and calculations right so they'd hit the next supply cache. Miss it and They Would Die. Scott's party died a few miles from a supply depot, and had wasted considerably time and strength searching for previous caches. Likewise if someone broke a leg, or a sled runner came off and couldn't be fixed, They Would Die.
Books are software. Unless you're a collector, their value is in the text and illustrations they contain (software). Not the physical paper and glue which binds them. Same goes for microfiche, audio CDs, DVDs, and video game cartridges. They're all software, and their physical form is a consequence of the technological limitations of past generations, not expedience.
That's the real mental hump we need to get over. Stop thinking of libraries as a place where you can borrow books (and other software). Start thinking of them as places where you can get a copy of archived software. Once you realize this, you realize that a library's roles of archivist and distributor are one and the same. The library need to have a copy of everything if it wants to allow people to obtain a copy from them. Unfortunately, the copyright industry has a vested interest in preventing this sort of mentality (copy instead of borrow/buy) from taking hold among the population.
There's this widespread mistaken belief that radiation is not normal, and is only created by nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors. Radiation is completely normal and is everywhere around you.
The highest radiation dose most people receive in a year actually comes from their own bodies. There's a naturally occurring radioactive isotope of potassium, and our nervous system needs potassium to function. Likewise, foods high in potassium can give you an elevated radiation dose. The radiation sensors at our border checkpoints designed to detect terrorists trying to smuggle in a dirty bomb are forever being triggered by cat litter, tiles, and foods high in potassium like bananas, nuts, etc..
After that comes rocks - mainly granite, but also things like beach sand. They have trace amounts of natural uranium which is radioactive. Having granite countertops in your kitchen substantially increases your annual radiation dose. The radon which can build up in your basement if you live in the mountains comes from rocks. Radon is one of the byproducts of uranium's natural decay chain.
After that is cosmic rays from space. Living at higher altitudes increases your exposure to this radiation source, since there's less atmosphere above you to absorb it. A transcontinental flight exposes you to about as much additional radiation as a medical x-ray. All the people who fled Japan after Fukushima by flying home unwittingly subjected themselves to more radiation during the flight than they would have received from Fukushima if they had just stayed in Japan.
Anyhow, uranium is water soluble. As a result, seawater has a much higher concentration of natural radionuclides than you normally encounter on land. So if you're that paranoid about radiation, you shouldn't swim in the ocean (you shouldn't even go to the beach, where the sand and sun will irradiate you). The increase in radioactivity from pre- to post-Fukushima is tiny compared to natural levels. The reason we know it's coming from Fukushima is not because the water has suddenly become radioactive. It's because the radioactivity is coming from certain isotopes which have short half-lives so have long since disappeared as a natural radiation source. Fukushima was the only recent event which created a bunch of those short-lived isotopes, so we know that if we detect radiation from those isotopes, that they must have come from Fukushima.
The high mercury content is in the meat from toothed whales - dolphins, porpoises, false killer whales, etc. - which aren't as well-protected by the IWC. They eat fish, which allows the mercury to build up over several tiers of the food chain, causing mercury to concentrate. It's the same reason we have warnings about eating too much tuna - they're on top of the food chain too so have built up high concentrations of mercury. (The mercury originally came from gold mining, but nowadays mostly comes from burning coal.)
The whales affected by resuming commercial whaling are baleen whales. Those are filter feeders which only occasionally eat fish. They primarily eat plankton and krill, which are very low on the food chain so there's been no chance for mercury to build up. Their meat will be considerably if not acceptably lower in mercury content.
So from a mercury contamination standpoint, the resumption of commercial whaling would actually mean the "whale meat" a Japanese consumer buys in a store would on average have less mercury. That could potentially make it more palatable to Japanese, schools, and the poor.
He left out the greater context in which this was happening. Netscape was the dominant browser from 1993-1998. You had to pay to buy Netscape during this time, just like buying Photoshop or Office. IE wasn't included as part of Win95, and as a standalone product it wasn't very successful.
Gates didn't believe in the Internet. Microsoft had bet on the CompuServe/GEnie/AOL model of global networking - where people paid to dialup to portals set up and controlled by one company. MSNBC was originally Microsoft's (and NBC's joint) foray into this model. That's right, you initially had to subscribe to MSNBC in order to view its content. As a result, Windows was late getting a TCP/IP stack (necessary for Internet) built in (it was included with Win95). Microsoft was very much a follower on everything happening on the Internet, like the web (which became big in 1994). Microsoft couldn't stomach the idea of someone else controlling the web, so they went for the jugular. They included IE for free with Win98, thus choking off Netscape's revenue stream. What Microsoft had done to Stacker was still fresh in everyone's minds. (Stac came up with the idea of disk compression. When Microsoft was unable to come to a licensing agreement with Stac, they built their own version and included it for free with MS-DOS, thus killing off the sale-ability of Stac's product.)
Bundling IE with Win98 for free would of course would raise the same legal issues the Stacker case raised - whether Microsoft should be allowed to use profits from DOS/Windows to subsidize development of products which competed with existing products which ran on DOS/Windows. There was a possibility a court would order Microsoft to unbundle IE and sell it separately in competition with Netscape. So to stave off that possibility, they did everything they could to tie IE as deeply as they could within Windows. That way they could honestly argue in court that it was impossible to unbundle IE from Windows.
And that deep embedding to prevent a court from thwarting their ploy to kill off Netscape is why an IE patch today can make Windows unbootable.
The COM and ActiveX stuff is relevant because Microsoft realized that if the world moved from DOS/Windows apps to generic web-based apps which could run on any OS as long as it had a compliant browser, nobody would pay for DOS/Windows anymore. So they set out to take control of web-based apps with ActiveX. (As it turned out, the performance hit for running a web-based app was big enough that it didn't really become competitive with native OSes until the mid-2000s, about the time Flash and Java came into their own.)
I really think this is Amazon's biggest weakness. If some competing online shopping site comes around with a more effective search, I'd switch. It's why I still buy most of my computer components from Newegg instead of Amazon. Newegg's search works, and helps you easily eliminate products you're not looking for. (You just have to make sure to set Newegg as the seller to filter out all the crap reseller offerings.)
If only iPhone owners had a way to revert to an older version of iOS. But Apple in their infinite wisdom decided the extra security (and lower maintenance) of forcing everyone onto the same version was more important than having a safety net in case of a screwed up update. (I'd throw in a barb at Microsoft and Windows 10's automatic Updates here, but at least they still allow you to uninstall select updates that cause problems.)
Republicans love giving power to government for law enforcement purposes. Democrats love giving power to government for social justice purposes. Libertarians are against big government in case it ever becomes corrupt, but were always ridiculed because "that could never happen here." Well, now do you believe it could happen here? The only real check on authoritarianism is to prevent government from amassing that much power in the first place.
Yes a benevolent oligarchy or a benevolent dictatorship can be more effective than a democracy. But the tradeoff is a higher risk of turning into an authoritarian oligarchy or dictatorship. The Libertarian argument is that it's better to just suffer with less effective government, than to give government more power and risk it turning authoritarian and abusing that power. Every time you the thought "there aught to be a law against that" crosses your mind, the next thing you should think about is how such a law could be abused by the government. Only after you've considered that full range of possibilities can you impartially decide if things really would be better with such a law. Otherwise you end up like China, which has thousands of behavioral laws that are never enforced. Unless you piss off the Communist leadership, in which case they throw the book at you and either send you to a labor camp or chop off your head.
If you can produce sufficient life support facilities to keep a colony alive on Mars, you can use the exact same life support facilities to keep a colony alive on Earth after a catastrophic asteroid impact. Minus the enormous transport costs. Seriously, the atmospheric, temperature, and radiation conditions on Mars make a nuclear winter on Earth look like a walk in the park.
While that's true, the fact that it takes more than 1000x the weight in support infrastructure and fuel to provide life support for astronauts (not to mention return trip costs) means we should keep sending robots.