This is the part the nuclear proponents always studiously ignore. Such disasters can render areas uninhabitable for thousands of years. It isn't the direct deaths that are the problem, it is the long term impacts to the environment that remove chunks of the earth from human habitation for many generations.
It's not being ignored. It's accounted for.
1) The vast majority of the region around Chernobyl will probably be safe within a few hundred years. The area immediately around Fukushima will probably be considered contaminated for 50-100 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were continuously inhabited, with very little to no negative effect on post-bombing residents. This is nuclear science 101. If radioactive isotopes are extremely dangerous, that means they have short half-lives, and thus are only around for hours or days. If contaminants last for thousands of years as you allude, that means they have long half-lives, and thus are not very radioactive nor dangerous enough to render the area uninhabitable.
It's the radioactive contaminants with medium half-lives which are most dangerous. Their half-lives are long for them to stick around for years/decades, but short enough that they're still dangerously radioactive. These typically have half-lives of 10-30 years, meaning their contamination will only last a few decades to a century. Very few, rare isotopes match your criteria of long half-lives but high radioactivity (it happens when the decay chain of a long half-life isotope results in a bunch of short half-life isotopes in quick succession).
2) As I outlined in the previous Fukushima topic, hydro and wind render more land area uninhabitable per MWh of energy generated than nuclear. Solar technically only renders the land shaded rather than uninhabitable, but if the panels/reflectors are installed on the ground, then it's uninhabitable. And unlike nuclear which only renders land uninhabitable when there's an accident, the renewable technologies render land uninhabitable as a consequence of their normal operation.
If, as you state, you wish to minimize the "chunks of earth removed from human habitation for many generations," nuclear is the power source which has the smallest footprint per unit of energy generated.
Put it in a spread sheet, Crank in assembly, shipping, divide by number of units, an out pops the Bill of Materials cost.
That's why you get things estimated to the penny.
Maybe that qualifies as BOGUS in your world, but the story clearly states " analyst estimates". I'm not sure the word "bogus" can rationally be applied to an estimate.
Since you don't seem to know about error propagation, let me fill you in. Anyone who has a decent background in math, and certainly any engineer or scientist should know how to propagate error or uncertainty. I wouldn't be surprised if it were taught to accountants too.
Without knowing if uncertainties in the component prices were propagated, the estimated bill of materials could be $209.63 +/- $0.40, or it could be $209.63 +/- $25. The former would make the "loses $10 per sale" statement completely accurate despite being an estimate. The latter would make the statement completely bogus, estimate or not. If as you're implying uncertainty wasn't propagated, that makes the estimate worthless since it could be completely accurate, or completely bogus, or anything in between. That's what people are getting at.
Ultimately the carriers are being wasteful at times, but not nearly to the degree that Citi says they are.
The government shouldn't have sold spectrum, it should have leased it, with lease renewal fees gradually increasing over time like we do with property taxes. One of the purposes of commercial property taxes is to encourage efficient use of land. If you own land in a major city's downtown area, the temptation is to sit on that land as it appreciates in value. After all, it costs you no more to hold onto that land than it does to hold onto land in the middle of the desert. That's good for you, but bad for society overall. By charging you high property tax on that valuable piece of land, it gives you two choices: Develop the land into something useful for society which generates enough revenue for you to offset the high property tax, or sell the land to someone who will develop it.
That's what the government should have done with spectrum. Recurring and increasing annual lease fees would've forced spectrum owners to use it, or sell it off to someone who would use it. By selling the spectrum instead of leasing it, we've got a bunch of companies now suspected of wastefully sitting on spectrum simply because they can.
2 spaces is more compatible too. It's trivial to write a script which converts a doc with 2 spaces after sentence-ending periods into 1 space. It's virtually impossible to write one which does the reverse (it'll get hung up on words like "Dr." and "U.S." when they end a sentence).
If for some obscure reason you should ever want to print something you 2-space type or display it in a monospaced font, you can just take your original text and use it as-is. Someone following the 1 space rule will need to completely re-edit. Meanwhile, HTML automatically converts 2 spaces to 1 space for display on web pages, meaning no extra work for us 2-spacers.
The thing is, the fact that it's recipient-pays is the only thing preventing cell phones from being deluged with telemarketing calls right now. Since the recipient (you) have to pay for the telemarketing call, there is a financial rationale to ban such calls. If we switched to a caller-pays system, telemarketers could say it costs you nothing to receive their calls, so there's no justification for a law prohibiting them from calling.
The problem isn't that we're mandated to buy it. The problem is that it's a mandatory service that *SHOULD BE PROVIDED BY THE GOVERNMENT*.
Then do it the right way and get a Constitutional Amendment passed which mandates it. After a lot of thought and discussion on this, I'm with you and convinced that a certain level of health care should indeed be a guaranteed human right. But attempting to make that a reality via legislation is simply the wrong way to do it. If it is that fundamental, then the Constitution needs to reflect it. Yes that's a lot harder to do, but that's the point. If we can't convince 3/4ths of the states that it's that fundamental, then it doesn't matter how fundamental you or I think it is - in the eyes of our democracy it is not fundamental and not something that "should be provided by the government".
I learned long ago that "law" and "logical" don't go together. There's a law that makes it illegal to charge extra if a customer pays with a credit card. But it's legal to offer a discount if the customer pays by any other means.
I'm pretty sure they do it this way for the same reason most rebates are still mail-in. They don't expect the user to actually do it out of inconvenience.
That is in fact the reason why rebates are mail-in, but it's not as nefarious as you make it out to be. Take what happened with the HP Touchpad blowout as an example. HP decided to price the Touchpad far below its fair market value. That resulted in demand which far outstripped supply. Many people who wanted it got one at a great price. But huge quantities were also scooped up by middlemen who resold them at a huge profit at closer to fair market value.
So how can a manufacturer discount its product below fair market value, without giving middlemen an opportunity to buy it up and resell it at a profit? You offer a rebate, but you have to make it just annoying enough and the terms restrictive enough that a middleman can't apply for all those rebates himself. What is a 15 minute annoyance for the end-buyer becomes hours of work for a middleman trying to flip dozens of the item for a profit. Consequently it's no longer worth his time, which leaves more of the rebate-discounted item for purchase by real end-users.
TFA says Zynga blames it on Facebook demanding 30% of their revenue. That would mean (assuming similar ratio of gross revenue to expenses in the same quarter last year):
So their profit margin in 2010 was 31.6% of gross revenue. Facebook is demanding 30% of their gross revenue this year, which leaves them with a profit margin of just 1.6% in 2011.
It looks like they modified the test for the 787, possibly in response to the CFRP wing's ability to withstand greater deflections. It looks like they've got a box at the tip simulating the loading of the tip that's transferred to the rest of the wing. In the old tests, they loaded each section of the wing with a cable. This resulted in some pretty huge deflections for the tips. Here's the 777 wing test which showed a much more impressive deflection at the tips (though I agree, nowhere close to touching).
The problem with large wing deflections using cables to simulate loading is that the angle the cable makes with the wing deviates further from perpendicular the greater the deflection. So if you have a wing which is extremely flexible at the tips, a straight cable loading test no longer simulates a realistic load.
Most videos are 480p or 720p, hardly anything in between. So the choice was between video hardware capable of 480p and upscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen, or video hardware capable of 720p and downscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen. From the tests I've done, there's not much difference in appearance between 480p upscaled or 720p downscaled to fit on the NC's screen. So I think B&N made the right call. You lose the ability to play native 720p videos from camera phones, but that wasn't a feature originally intended by B&N, it was one added later by people hacking the NC to run vanilla Android.
Also, 480p may be 2/3rds the NC's native resolution. But 720p (the next step up) is 2.2x the pixels of 480p. So the next step up from the video decode hardware they used on the NC would have to have been more than twice as powerful. And anyway, the Nook Color is primarily an e-reader. B&N (rightly IMHO) put more money into a nice high-resolution screen, less into video playback on that screen. Have you also noticed its capacitive screen can only track two simultaneous touches, unlike the 6-10 for other more general purpose devices?
but name one phone or laptop a normal person can easily buy with anything other than the bog standard 400-500 cycle-then-dead Li-Ion battery?
The number of charge cycles you can get out of a Li-ion battery depends on how deeply you cycle it. If you regularly charge it to 100% and drain it to 0%, it'll only last a couple hundred cycles. If you limit it between 25%-75% (like the Chevy Volt does) it'll last a lot longer.
The reason why it's mostly laptops which suffer from early Li-ion battery death is because they tend to be run from 100% to 0%, and early models (and some current ones) keep topping off the battery while it's on AC. It'll hit 100%, the charger shuts off, the battery naturally discharges a bit and hits 99%, and the charger immediately tops it up to 100% again. Repeat a dozen times a day for a year and you end up with a battery which only lasts 15 minutes.
The problem isn't as common on phone batteries because they're mostly used off AC, and they're almost never allowed to run down to 0%. So they're being charged to 100%, but usually only discharged to 20% or so before recharging.
I'm seeing more and more laptops which are aware of this problem and attempt to address it. The Thinkpads have a utility which lets you pick the charge and recharge points. I have my dad's Thinkpad set to stop charging at 90%, and not top off the battery until it drops below 80%. Sony has a utility which lets you select 50% or 80% as the max charge. And one other brand I can't recall has a 20% disparity between the mAh written on the pack and the mAh reported to Windows, which makes me suspect the battery is intentionally misreporting its capacity to Windows to keep it between something like 10% and 90% charge.
Staxxon, a NJ-based startup, has engineered a folding steel container (it folds like a toddler's playpen), which is designed to make shipping more efficient by 'reducing the number of container ship movements.'
You can't do that. Imbalances in amount of cargo going East vs West are inevitable because of trade imbalances, but Kirchoff's laws also apply to container ships: Every container ship going East must return West.
Say there are 5 container ships with containers full of cargo which travel from China to the U.S. On the return trip, say there's only one container ship's worth of cargo. So you load one container ship with cargo for the return trip. The containers from the other 4 ships you collapse and load onto a second ship. You've now loaded all the containers needed for the next 5 ships worth of cargo onto 2 ships heading back to China. Great! You've eliminated the need for 3 ships on the return leg, right? Wrong. Once those containers get back to China and are loaded up with cargo, you now have 5 ships worth of cargo containers, but only 2 ships to transport them. Those 3 ships you left in the U.S. have to make the return trip to China regardless of whether they're loaded or empty.
The number of container ship movements is dictated by the maximum amount of cargo traveling between two destinations one-way, not the minimum. The minimum is irrelevant since you need the empty containers and container ships to make the return trip anyway to ferry the next batch of cargo along the maximum one-way route. The only way you can reduce the number of container ship movements is to scrap the 3 container ships you left in the U.S., and replace them with 3 new ones built in China. That's just not economically feasible. You might be able to shaft some of the ship captains into having to make an empty trip back to China, but all that'll do is cause them to raise the price they charge for the next trip from China to the U.S. The net result is no reduction in container ship movements, and no reduction in fuel consumed, and no reduction in overall cost.
It's moving at 4-5 miles per second. If you can predict the time of reentry of an umpowered, tumbling, oddly shaped object to within 30 minutes, you've narrowed down its impact area to all of 7200-9000 miles. Or roughly 1/3rd of the way around the earth. Even narrowing it down to 5 minutes results in a 1200-1500 mile uncertainty.
The true cost of the employee should be salary plus benefits.
It's salary + benefits + employer's share of SS, Medicare/Medicaid taxes + unemployment insurance + worker's comp insurance + hiring/training costs + travel expenses (many contractors "commute" by flying out on Mondays, living in a rented apartment, and flying home on Fridays). I would assume the government is paying for workspace and equipment, but if they're not, tack that on as well. Many smaller companies without a lawyer on staff also have employment practices liability insurance to protect them from the cost of a lawsuit filed by an employee.
A 2:1 ratio between what it costs the company to retain and maintain a tech employee vs. what the employee receives in salary + benefits sounds about right to me. This MIT/Sloan page says a tech worker at a fully managed company costs about 2.7x his/her base salary. So 2:1 is in the right ballpark.
No major carrier offers you the hotspot feature for free (even though Android natively supports it if the carriers hadn't blocked it). You have to either root the phone, or pay the carrier's hotspot fee. In Sprint's case it was $29.99/mo with unlimited bandwidth. Now apparently it's $29.99/mo with a 5 GB data cap.
The hotspot feature works fine if you root your phone. Don't use Sprint's hotspot app - it looks specifically for a hotspot plan. Download WiFi Tether instead. There are some issues turning it on with 4G enabled - turn it on with only 3G enabled, then turn on 4G and it works fine. And AFAIK Sprint's regular unlimited phone data plans are still unlimited.
VDSL and VDSL2 don't have a bias for download (or upload) bandwidth. Your carrier can choose anything from fully symmetric to heavily asymmetric, but the technology itself doesn't care. Bandwidth is not arbitrarily pre-allocated like with ADSL.
It isn't so much whether the plants themselves can be designed to be safe, sited in safe areas, built safely or operated safely; it's whether we can trust the people who are involved not to take kickbacks or falsify records because they're too lazy to x-ray all the pipe welds or be bullied by politicians or miss what turn out to be obvious problems.
That's an advantage for nuclear, not a disadvantage. What you say about safety is true for all power plants. Coal plants, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams can be built and operated dangerously. They're distributed so the number of people killed/injured from a single incident is smaller. But if you assume the same level of corruption in all industries, the number of people killed by those technologies will be about the same or higher per unit of energy generated.
So how is this an advantage for nuclear? Because nuclear's power generation is so concentrated, it's much easier to enforce stricter building codes, maintenance schedules, and inspections for the same amount of energy generated. Instead of amassing a small army to monitor 10,000 wind turbines being built, inspected, and maintained over 1000 km^2 of land, you can have a dozen inspectors do the same at a single nuclear plant. The statistics bear this out. Historically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Safer than coal, safer than solar, safer than hydro, safer than wind.
The problem with nuclear disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima is that they leave large portions of land unusable for millenia. (besides having the risk of killing lots of people too.) The effects are not just to the poor people who work on those plants (just as the poor miners) but that they leave a severe risk of exposure for many generations to come. The cost of maintaining those patches of land unusable are very large. Much larger costs than even those needed to keep an undamaged power plant secure beyond its productive life;
Wind turbines suffering blade failures and ice throws have killed many people, more per MWh generated than nuclear has. Consequently, France has established 500 m exclusion zones around wind turbines, where people are prohibited from entering. Germany has a 600 m exclusion zone. For a given amount of average MW generated, the area of this mandated exclusion zone for wind farms far exceeds the evacuation zone caused by the Fukushima accident. You can reduce the size of the exclusion zone by putting turbines closer together, but it's still far worse than nuclear.
The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 20 km evacuation zone, and let's ignore that roughly half of that zone extends over the sea. A 20 km radius encompasses an area of 1257 km^2. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.297 km^2 per MW average.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 322 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 128.8 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.590 km^2 per MW on average.
So just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about twice as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history, MW for MW. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.
But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (20 km) and Chernobyl (30 km) work out to 4084 km^2. The average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.012 km^2 per MW on average. In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power with solar, you'd render 4.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable. Hydro would be 11x as much. And wind about 51x as much land area uninhabitable (about 100x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee).
Any retirement investment method is counting on the gradual growth of the value its investments over time.
That's not true. If there were zero growth, I could still stick 20% of everything I make under the mattress to use when I retire. Putting retirement savings into investments which grow is just icing on the cake for a private retirement fund.
Social Security relies on growth to stay solvent. When growth slows or hits a hiccup (like the baby boomers retiring en masse), it runs into solvency problems. I agree that there's a range of scenarios across which Social Security can work and stay solvent (basically if population and/or economic growth exceeds a certain level). But it's downright dishonest to equate it to a private retirement plan. Should the U.S. enter a protracted depression (say 10-20 years), Social Security is doomed to go into the red. A private retirement fund OTOH would survive in the black - its value may be diminished, but it would never go negative.
1. I am for the new tax on people with incomes over $1 million. The long-term trend in incomes supports the notion that the wealthy are profiting disproportionately from increased productivity gains in the last few decades.
2. I even buy that they deserve to be taxed at a higher rate. That said, 60 seconds looking at the IRS tax statistics will tell you that they are already taxed at a higher rate:
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $1 million or more ranges from 22.6% to 25.8%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $500k-$1M is 24.4%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $200k-$500k is 19.6%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for everyone else ranges from 0.1% to 11.9%
Maybe Warren Buffet pays a smaller percentage of his income than his secretary, but he's an outlier. You don't justify policy based on outliers.
3. If you play around with the tax statistics, you'll see that even if you taxed everyone making $1 million or more at 100% their income, it would only increase revenue by about $550 billion. That's right - you could've confiscated every dollar made by "evil rich people" in 2009 and it only would've reduced the 2010 deficit by half. If you taxed them at 50%, you'd increase revenue by only about $200 billion, which compared to our current deficits and debt is peanuts.
I don't begrudge you your right to hate rich people. But check it at the door when you come to discuss policy. The simple fact is that despite increasing income disparity, the U.S.still has pretty good income dispersion. The bulk of the U.S. income base sits between $50k-$500k per year (68.6% of all income). The bulk of the U.S. tax base sits between $50k-$1M per year (72.5% of all income tax revenue). That's where you need to raise taxes if you want a significant increase in income tax revenue. Going after people who make over $1 million (10.6% of all income, 20.4% of all income tax revenue) makes for good headlines and may make you feel better, but it's pretty ineffective at increasing tax revenue when your deficit is 8% of GDP.
For this purpose, just about anything would be better than the iPad. Apple doesn't let you side-load apps; you have to go through their App Store. So if the government wants to make some custom app for viewing/filling out a form, they can't do it themselves. They have to send it through the App Store. That's the drawback of Apple's walled garden approach - you don't really own the device, and you're not free to do whatever you want with it.
Note: I am fiscally conservative and pro-free market.
Once the wealth accumulates to the top only, how will the economy survive without spending by the middle and lower classes? Won't a lot of business just shutdown because people don't have money to spend?
That won't happen. What's been going on is that the upper class has been grabbing a bigger share of the economic pie, but not so big as to upset middle class voters. They've been letting just enough of the economic growth trickle down to the middle class to keep them content enough not to revolt. The gini coefficient for the U.S. shows the same thing happening.
Essentially, the upper class has applied market principles to voting patterns, and come up with a fairly optimal solution to "how do I keep more money, without getting poorer people upset enough that they vote to take it away from me?" That solution requires the middle class continue to be well-paid, just not as well as it could be.
For that reason I'm in general agreement with Mr. Buffet and support raising the upper bracket tax rate. The ideal solution IMHO would be overhauling our tax code and simplifying it - get rid of the gazillion exemptions and special case tax breaks which have been bought by special interest lobbies over the years and inflate it to over a thousand pages. That will help put small businesses (the group I most identify with) on a level playing field with big businesses. But absent such an overhaul, beefing up the alternative minimum tax to a higher rate and having it apply to all income over $1 million regardless of source, as this legislation does, is a good second.
That said, if you pour over the IRS tax statistics, you'll realize pretty quickly that:
(1) There isn't as big a difference between the effective tax rate as Obama is making it sound like. The effective tax rate goes from 6% at $30-$40k, to 11.9% at $100k-$200k, to 24.4% at $500k-$1M, to $25.3% at $1M-$1.5M. From there it climbs slowly to 25.8% at $2M-$5m, before dropping to 22.6% at $10M or more. These people are already paying a higher overall effective tax rate than anyone under $500k. While they can certainly afford to pay more, the argument that they're paying less than you and I just isn't supported by IRS statistics. Maybe Mr. Buffet is paying less since his income is investment-heavy. But on average they already pay more.
(2) People making over $1 million/year represent only about 0.3% of the population, and less than 11% of total income. You could tax them at 100% and you'd only collect about $550 billion/yr in additional taxes. They simply don't have enough aggregate income to offset the huge deficits we're running. To pay for the deficits, you realistically will have to increase the tax rates all the way down to $50k-$75k (upper middle class). Either that, or cut spending. Obama's promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $200k is simply unrealistic if you also want a budget close to balancedt (I pointed this out during the election too).
So while I'm for the idea, I'm under no illusions that it'll have a significant impact on our deficit. Even if he raised their tax rate to 50%, it'd only generate about $200 billion in additional revenue. Far short of what's needed to balance the budget.
How about a tax scale that accounts for the current unemployment rate? Higher unemployment = higher taxes for corporations and rich, lower unemployment is lower taxes for corporations and the rich. Hell of an incentive to create jobs.
Unstable positive feedback loop. Unemployment goes up, causing taxes to go up, leaving companies less money, leading to layoffs, causing unemployment to go up even more, causing taxes to go up even more, etc. Or unemployment goes down, causing taxes to go down, leaving companies with more money, leading to more hiring, causing unemployment to go down even more, causing taxes to go down even more, etc.
Unstable systems like this are very brittle, and tend to overreact wildly to changing inputs. Remember, the overall goal behind market manipulation like this is to stabilize the boom/bust cycle of economics, not exaggerate it.
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It's not being ignored. It's accounted for.
1) The vast majority of the region around Chernobyl will probably be safe within a few hundred years. The area immediately around Fukushima will probably be considered contaminated for 50-100 years. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were continuously inhabited, with very little to no negative effect on post-bombing residents. This is nuclear science 101. If radioactive isotopes are extremely dangerous, that means they have short half-lives, and thus are only around for hours or days. If contaminants last for thousands of years as you allude, that means they have long half-lives, and thus are not very radioactive nor dangerous enough to render the area uninhabitable.
It's the radioactive contaminants with medium half-lives which are most dangerous. Their half-lives are long for them to stick around for years/decades, but short enough that they're still dangerously radioactive. These typically have half-lives of 10-30 years, meaning their contamination will only last a few decades to a century. Very few, rare isotopes match your criteria of long half-lives but high radioactivity (it happens when the decay chain of a long half-life isotope results in a bunch of short half-life isotopes in quick succession).
2) As I outlined in the previous Fukushima topic, hydro and wind render more land area uninhabitable per MWh of energy generated than nuclear. Solar technically only renders the land shaded rather than uninhabitable, but if the panels/reflectors are installed on the ground, then it's uninhabitable. And unlike nuclear which only renders land uninhabitable when there's an accident, the renewable technologies render land uninhabitable as a consequence of their normal operation.
If, as you state, you wish to minimize the "chunks of earth removed from human habitation for many generations," nuclear is the power source which has the smallest footprint per unit of energy generated.
Since you don't seem to know about error propagation, let me fill you in. Anyone who has a decent background in math, and certainly any engineer or scientist should know how to propagate error or uncertainty. I wouldn't be surprised if it were taught to accountants too.
Without knowing if uncertainties in the component prices were propagated, the estimated bill of materials could be $209.63 +/- $0.40, or it could be $209.63 +/- $25. The former would make the "loses $10 per sale" statement completely accurate despite being an estimate. The latter would make the statement completely bogus, estimate or not. If as you're implying uncertainty wasn't propagated, that makes the estimate worthless since it could be completely accurate, or completely bogus, or anything in between. That's what people are getting at.
The government shouldn't have sold spectrum, it should have leased it, with lease renewal fees gradually increasing over time like we do with property taxes. One of the purposes of commercial property taxes is to encourage efficient use of land. If you own land in a major city's downtown area, the temptation is to sit on that land as it appreciates in value. After all, it costs you no more to hold onto that land than it does to hold onto land in the middle of the desert. That's good for you, but bad for society overall. By charging you high property tax on that valuable piece of land, it gives you two choices: Develop the land into something useful for society which generates enough revenue for you to offset the high property tax, or sell the land to someone who will develop it.
That's what the government should have done with spectrum. Recurring and increasing annual lease fees would've forced spectrum owners to use it, or sell it off to someone who would use it. By selling the spectrum instead of leasing it, we've got a bunch of companies now suspected of wastefully sitting on spectrum simply because they can.
2 spaces is more compatible too. It's trivial to write a script which converts a doc with 2 spaces after sentence-ending periods into 1 space. It's virtually impossible to write one which does the reverse (it'll get hung up on words like "Dr." and "U.S." when they end a sentence).
If for some obscure reason you should ever want to print something you 2-space type or display it in a monospaced font, you can just take your original text and use it as-is. Someone following the 1 space rule will need to completely re-edit. Meanwhile, HTML automatically converts 2 spaces to 1 space for display on web pages, meaning no extra work for us 2-spacers.
The thing is, the fact that it's recipient-pays is the only thing preventing cell phones from being deluged with telemarketing calls right now. Since the recipient (you) have to pay for the telemarketing call, there is a financial rationale to ban such calls. If we switched to a caller-pays system, telemarketers could say it costs you nothing to receive their calls, so there's no justification for a law prohibiting them from calling.
Then do it the right way and get a Constitutional Amendment passed which mandates it. After a lot of thought and discussion on this, I'm with you and convinced that a certain level of health care should indeed be a guaranteed human right. But attempting to make that a reality via legislation is simply the wrong way to do it. If it is that fundamental, then the Constitution needs to reflect it. Yes that's a lot harder to do, but that's the point. If we can't convince 3/4ths of the states that it's that fundamental, then it doesn't matter how fundamental you or I think it is - in the eyes of our democracy it is not fundamental and not something that "should be provided by the government".
I learned long ago that "law" and "logical" don't go together. There's a law that makes it illegal to charge extra if a customer pays with a credit card. But it's legal to offer a discount if the customer pays by any other means.
That is in fact the reason why rebates are mail-in, but it's not as nefarious as you make it out to be. Take what happened with the HP Touchpad blowout as an example. HP decided to price the Touchpad far below its fair market value. That resulted in demand which far outstripped supply. Many people who wanted it got one at a great price. But huge quantities were also scooped up by middlemen who resold them at a huge profit at closer to fair market value.
So how can a manufacturer discount its product below fair market value, without giving middlemen an opportunity to buy it up and resell it at a profit? You offer a rebate, but you have to make it just annoying enough and the terms restrictive enough that a middleman can't apply for all those rebates himself. What is a 15 minute annoyance for the end-buyer becomes hours of work for a middleman trying to flip dozens of the item for a profit. Consequently it's no longer worth his time, which leaves more of the rebate-discounted item for purchase by real end-users.
TFA says Zynga blames it on Facebook demanding 30% of their revenue. That would mean (assuming similar ratio of gross revenue to expenses in the same quarter last year):
profit2011 = profit2010 / 20
profit2010 - profit2011 = 0.3
profit2010 - ( profit2010 / 20 ) = 0.3
profit2010*(20-1) / 20 = 0.3
profit2010 = 0.3*20 / 19 = 0.31579 = 31.6%
So their profit margin in 2010 was 31.6% of gross revenue. Facebook is demanding 30% of their gross revenue this year, which leaves them with a profit margin of just 1.6% in 2011.
It looks like they modified the test for the 787, possibly in response to the CFRP wing's ability to withstand greater deflections. It looks like they've got a box at the tip simulating the loading of the tip that's transferred to the rest of the wing. In the old tests, they loaded each section of the wing with a cable. This resulted in some pretty huge deflections for the tips. Here's the 777 wing test which showed a much more impressive deflection at the tips (though I agree, nowhere close to touching).
The problem with large wing deflections using cables to simulate loading is that the angle the cable makes with the wing deviates further from perpendicular the greater the deflection. So if you have a wing which is extremely flexible at the tips, a straight cable loading test no longer simulates a realistic load.
Most videos are 480p or 720p, hardly anything in between. So the choice was between video hardware capable of 480p and upscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen, or video hardware capable of 720p and downscaling it to fit a 1024x600 screen. From the tests I've done, there's not much difference in appearance between 480p upscaled or 720p downscaled to fit on the NC's screen. So I think B&N made the right call. You lose the ability to play native 720p videos from camera phones, but that wasn't a feature originally intended by B&N, it was one added later by people hacking the NC to run vanilla Android.
Also, 480p may be 2/3rds the NC's native resolution. But 720p (the next step up) is 2.2x the pixels of 480p. So the next step up from the video decode hardware they used on the NC would have to have been more than twice as powerful. And anyway, the Nook Color is primarily an e-reader. B&N (rightly IMHO) put more money into a nice high-resolution screen, less into video playback on that screen. Have you also noticed its capacitive screen can only track two simultaneous touches, unlike the 6-10 for other more general purpose devices?
The number of charge cycles you can get out of a Li-ion battery depends on how deeply you cycle it. If you regularly charge it to 100% and drain it to 0%, it'll only last a couple hundred cycles. If you limit it between 25%-75% (like the Chevy Volt does) it'll last a lot longer.
The reason why it's mostly laptops which suffer from early Li-ion battery death is because they tend to be run from 100% to 0%, and early models (and some current ones) keep topping off the battery while it's on AC. It'll hit 100%, the charger shuts off, the battery naturally discharges a bit and hits 99%, and the charger immediately tops it up to 100% again. Repeat a dozen times a day for a year and you end up with a battery which only lasts 15 minutes.
The problem isn't as common on phone batteries because they're mostly used off AC, and they're almost never allowed to run down to 0%. So they're being charged to 100%, but usually only discharged to 20% or so before recharging.
I'm seeing more and more laptops which are aware of this problem and attempt to address it. The Thinkpads have a utility which lets you pick the charge and recharge points. I have my dad's Thinkpad set to stop charging at 90%, and not top off the battery until it drops below 80%. Sony has a utility which lets you select 50% or 80% as the max charge. And one other brand I can't recall has a 20% disparity between the mAh written on the pack and the mAh reported to Windows, which makes me suspect the battery is intentionally misreporting its capacity to Windows to keep it between something like 10% and 90% charge.
You can't do that. Imbalances in amount of cargo going East vs West are inevitable because of trade imbalances, but Kirchoff's laws also apply to container ships: Every container ship going East must return West.
Say there are 5 container ships with containers full of cargo which travel from China to the U.S. On the return trip, say there's only one container ship's worth of cargo. So you load one container ship with cargo for the return trip. The containers from the other 4 ships you collapse and load onto a second ship. You've now loaded all the containers needed for the next 5 ships worth of cargo onto 2 ships heading back to China. Great! You've eliminated the need for 3 ships on the return leg, right? Wrong. Once those containers get back to China and are loaded up with cargo, you now have 5 ships worth of cargo containers, but only 2 ships to transport them. Those 3 ships you left in the U.S. have to make the return trip to China regardless of whether they're loaded or empty.
The number of container ship movements is dictated by the maximum amount of cargo traveling between two destinations one-way, not the minimum. The minimum is irrelevant since you need the empty containers and container ships to make the return trip anyway to ferry the next batch of cargo along the maximum one-way route. The only way you can reduce the number of container ship movements is to scrap the 3 container ships you left in the U.S., and replace them with 3 new ones built in China. That's just not economically feasible. You might be able to shaft some of the ship captains into having to make an empty trip back to China, but all that'll do is cause them to raise the price they charge for the next trip from China to the U.S. The net result is no reduction in container ship movements, and no reduction in fuel consumed, and no reduction in overall cost.
It's moving at 4-5 miles per second. If you can predict the time of reentry of an umpowered, tumbling, oddly shaped object to within 30 minutes, you've narrowed down its impact area to all of 7200-9000 miles. Or roughly 1/3rd of the way around the earth. Even narrowing it down to 5 minutes results in a 1200-1500 mile uncertainty.
It's salary + benefits + employer's share of SS, Medicare/Medicaid taxes + unemployment insurance + worker's comp insurance + hiring/training costs + travel expenses (many contractors "commute" by flying out on Mondays, living in a rented apartment, and flying home on Fridays). I would assume the government is paying for workspace and equipment, but if they're not, tack that on as well. Many smaller companies without a lawyer on staff also have employment practices liability insurance to protect them from the cost of a lawsuit filed by an employee.
A 2:1 ratio between what it costs the company to retain and maintain a tech employee vs. what the employee receives in salary + benefits sounds about right to me. This MIT/Sloan page says a tech worker at a fully managed company costs about 2.7x his/her base salary. So 2:1 is in the right ballpark.
Sounds more like something to help hide submarines from MADs.
No major carrier offers you the hotspot feature for free (even though Android natively supports it if the carriers hadn't blocked it). You have to either root the phone, or pay the carrier's hotspot fee. In Sprint's case it was $29.99/mo with unlimited bandwidth. Now apparently it's $29.99/mo with a 5 GB data cap.
The hotspot feature works fine if you root your phone. Don't use Sprint's hotspot app - it looks specifically for a hotspot plan. Download WiFi Tether instead. There are some issues turning it on with 4G enabled - turn it on with only 3G enabled, then turn on 4G and it works fine. And AFAIK Sprint's regular unlimited phone data plans are still unlimited.
VDSL and VDSL2 don't have a bias for download (or upload) bandwidth. Your carrier can choose anything from fully symmetric to heavily asymmetric, but the technology itself doesn't care. Bandwidth is not arbitrarily pre-allocated like with ADSL.
That's an advantage for nuclear, not a disadvantage. What you say about safety is true for all power plants. Coal plants, wind turbines, and hydroelectric dams can be built and operated dangerously. They're distributed so the number of people killed/injured from a single incident is smaller. But if you assume the same level of corruption in all industries, the number of people killed by those technologies will be about the same or higher per unit of energy generated.
So how is this an advantage for nuclear? Because nuclear's power generation is so concentrated, it's much easier to enforce stricter building codes, maintenance schedules, and inspections for the same amount of energy generated. Instead of amassing a small army to monitor 10,000 wind turbines being built, inspected, and maintained over 1000 km^2 of land, you can have a dozen inspectors do the same at a single nuclear plant. The statistics bear this out. Historically, nuclear is the safest power generation technology we've invented. Safer than coal, safer than solar, safer than hydro, safer than wind.
Wind turbines suffering blade failures and ice throws have killed many people, more per MWh generated than nuclear has. Consequently, France has established 500 m exclusion zones around wind turbines, where people are prohibited from entering. Germany has a 600 m exclusion zone. For a given amount of average MW generated, the area of this mandated exclusion zone for wind farms far exceeds the evacuation zone caused by the Fukushima accident. You can reduce the size of the exclusion zone by putting turbines closer together, but it's still far worse than nuclear.
The Fukushima plant had a nominal production capacity of 4696 MW. Multiplied by nuclear's average 90% capacity factor and that's 4226 MW average for the year. It currently has a 20 km evacuation zone, and let's ignore that roughly half of that zone extends over the sea. A 20 km radius encompasses an area of 1257 km^2. So the evacuation zone (which is by no means permanent, nor likely to be permanent) works out to 0.297 km^2 per MW average.
The largest wind farm in Europe is Whitelee Wind farm in Scotland. It has a nominal generating capacity of 322 MW. Onshore wind typically has a 20%-25% capacity factor, but Scotland's winds are strong and consistent, yielding an average capacity factor around 40%. So that's 128.8 MW average for the year. The farm covers 55 km^2 in a 13x8 km rectangle. Add a half km exclusion zone around the periphery and you get a total area of 76 km^2. So its exclusion zone works out to 0.590 km^2 per MW on average.
So just the regular operation of the largest wind farm in Europe renders about twice as much land uninhabitable as the second-worst nuclear accident in history, MW for MW. Hydroelectric dams create a lake behind them, rendering that land uninhabitable. Itaipu dam has a 1350 km^2 reservoir. It generates 91.6 TWh annually, which works out to 10449 MW on average, for an uninhabitable area of 0.129 km^2 per MW average. Solar (pretty much the most expensive power source) actually fares well by this metric. At 125 W/m^2 and a 15% capacity factor, it weighs in at a featherweight 0.053 km^2 per MW on average.
But wait, we looked at pretty much the worst case for nuclear, while looking at average or better-than-average cases for other technologies. What happens if you look at nuclear on average? After all, the vast majority of nuclear plants have operated safely for decades. The world's nuclear capaicty is 351 GW. The evacuation zones around Fukushima (20 km) and Chernobyl (30 km) work out to 4084 km^2. The average land area rendered uninhabitable by nuclear works out to 0.012 km^2 per MW on average. In other words, nuclear is the technology which renders the least amount of land uninhabitable per MW generated. If you replaced all nuclear power with solar, you'd render 4.6x as much land area as Fukushima + Chernobyl uninhabitable. Hydro would be 11x as much. And wind about 51x as much land area uninhabitable (about 100x for a more typical wind far than Whitelee).
That's not true. If there were zero growth, I could still stick 20% of everything I make under the mattress to use when I retire. Putting retirement savings into investments which grow is just icing on the cake for a private retirement fund.
Social Security relies on growth to stay solvent. When growth slows or hits a hiccup (like the baby boomers retiring en masse), it runs into solvency problems. I agree that there's a range of scenarios across which Social Security can work and stay solvent (basically if population and/or economic growth exceeds a certain level). But it's downright dishonest to equate it to a private retirement plan. Should the U.S. enter a protracted depression (say 10-20 years), Social Security is doomed to go into the red. A private retirement fund OTOH would survive in the black - its value may be diminished, but it would never go negative.
1. I am for the new tax on people with incomes over $1 million. The long-term trend in incomes supports the notion that the wealthy are profiting disproportionately from increased productivity gains in the last few decades.
2. I even buy that they deserve to be taxed at a higher rate. That said, 60 seconds looking at the IRS tax statistics will tell you that they are already taxed at a higher rate:
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $1 million or more ranges from 22.6% to 25.8%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $500k-$1M is 24.4%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for people making $200k-$500k is 19.6%.
The effective average federal income tax rate for everyone else ranges from 0.1% to 11.9%
Maybe Warren Buffet pays a smaller percentage of his income than his secretary, but he's an outlier. You don't justify policy based on outliers.
3. If you play around with the tax statistics, you'll see that even if you taxed everyone making $1 million or more at 100% their income, it would only increase revenue by about $550 billion. That's right - you could've confiscated every dollar made by "evil rich people" in 2009 and it only would've reduced the 2010 deficit by half. If you taxed them at 50%, you'd increase revenue by only about $200 billion, which compared to our current deficits and debt is peanuts.
I don't begrudge you your right to hate rich people. But check it at the door when you come to discuss policy. The simple fact is that despite increasing income disparity, the U.S.still has pretty good income dispersion. The bulk of the U.S. income base sits between $50k-$500k per year (68.6% of all income). The bulk of the U.S. tax base sits between $50k-$1M per year (72.5% of all income tax revenue). That's where you need to raise taxes if you want a significant increase in income tax revenue. Going after people who make over $1 million (10.6% of all income, 20.4% of all income tax revenue) makes for good headlines and may make you feel better, but it's pretty ineffective at increasing tax revenue when your deficit is 8% of GDP.
For this purpose, just about anything would be better than the iPad. Apple doesn't let you side-load apps; you have to go through their App Store. So if the government wants to make some custom app for viewing/filling out a form, they can't do it themselves. They have to send it through the App Store. That's the drawback of Apple's walled garden approach - you don't really own the device, and you're not free to do whatever you want with it.
That won't happen. What's been going on is that the upper class has been grabbing a bigger share of the economic pie, but not so big as to upset middle class voters. They've been letting just enough of the economic growth trickle down to the middle class to keep them content enough not to revolt. The gini coefficient for the U.S. shows the same thing happening.
Essentially, the upper class has applied market principles to voting patterns, and come up with a fairly optimal solution to "how do I keep more money, without getting poorer people upset enough that they vote to take it away from me?" That solution requires the middle class continue to be well-paid, just not as well as it could be.
For that reason I'm in general agreement with Mr. Buffet and support raising the upper bracket tax rate. The ideal solution IMHO would be overhauling our tax code and simplifying it - get rid of the gazillion exemptions and special case tax breaks which have been bought by special interest lobbies over the years and inflate it to over a thousand pages. That will help put small businesses (the group I most identify with) on a level playing field with big businesses. But absent such an overhaul, beefing up the alternative minimum tax to a higher rate and having it apply to all income over $1 million regardless of source, as this legislation does, is a good second.
That said, if you pour over the IRS tax statistics, you'll realize pretty quickly that:
(1) There isn't as big a difference between the effective tax rate as Obama is making it sound like. The effective tax rate goes from 6% at $30-$40k, to 11.9% at $100k-$200k, to 24.4% at $500k-$1M, to $25.3% at $1M-$1.5M. From there it climbs slowly to 25.8% at $2M-$5m, before dropping to 22.6% at $10M or more. These people are already paying a higher overall effective tax rate than anyone under $500k. While they can certainly afford to pay more, the argument that they're paying less than you and I just isn't supported by IRS statistics. Maybe Mr. Buffet is paying less since his income is investment-heavy. But on average they already pay more.
(2) People making over $1 million/year represent only about 0.3% of the population, and less than 11% of total income. You could tax them at 100% and you'd only collect about $550 billion/yr in additional taxes. They simply don't have enough aggregate income to offset the huge deficits we're running. To pay for the deficits, you realistically will have to increase the tax rates all the way down to $50k-$75k (upper middle class). Either that, or cut spending. Obama's promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $200k is simply unrealistic if you also want a budget close to balancedt (I pointed this out during the election too).
So while I'm for the idea, I'm under no illusions that it'll have a significant impact on our deficit. Even if he raised their tax rate to 50%, it'd only generate about $200 billion in additional revenue. Far short of what's needed to balance the budget.
Unstable positive feedback loop. Unemployment goes up, causing taxes to go up, leaving companies less money, leading to layoffs, causing unemployment to go up even more, causing taxes to go up even more, etc. Or unemployment goes down, causing taxes to go down, leaving companies with more money, leading to more hiring, causing unemployment to go down even more, causing taxes to go down even more, etc.
Unstable systems like this are very brittle, and tend to overreact wildly to changing inputs. Remember, the overall goal behind market manipulation like this is to stabilize the boom/bust cycle of economics, not exaggerate it.