I tried to stay on 1511 because the 1703 update broke a bunch of my program icons (turned them into generic icons even when I specifically selected the program icon), and for some reason prevented me from reinstalling those programs to fix the icons. I used on of the common tricks to block the update. For the first few months it worked. Then I started getting warnings every day that security support for 1511 had ended and I needed to update to 1703 to continue to get security updates. Eventually, all the tricks I'd used to prevent the update (disable the Windows Update service, set my connection to metered) stopped working. The Windows Update service would auto-enable itself and begin auto-downloading the 1703 update (3 GB) and trying to install it. And every time my program icons were still broken so I'd have to roll it back.
It auto-downloaded so many times that I was in danger of going over my monthly quota from my ISP, and I had to switch to using my phone's hotspot for Internet (where it still downloaded, but slowly enough that it wasn't trying to auto-update every few hours). Eventually I put aside an afternoon, updated, wrote down the name of every program whose icon was broken, rolled it back, reinstalled all those programs, then let Windows update to 1803. That seemed to fix the icons, although i still can't reinstall/repair any of those programs (guess I'll have to wipe and reinstall from scratch if that becomes an issue).
Anyhow, security updates for 1703 ended on October 9. So expect to experience the above strong-arm tactics to force you to upgrade in the coming months.
I'm sure NYC acted in it's own best interests. It's a complex set of things to balance.
No it didn't operate in its own best interests. Having a different tax rate Amazon negotiated for itself is inherently unfair to other businesses operating in the city. If a city thinks it can get a net tax increase if they can attract Amazon by offering it a lower tax rate, then that exact same reasoning applies to all businesses, not just Amazon. And "their own best interest" would be to lower the tax rate for everyone. Lots of small businesses would then set up in NYC instead of elsewhere, providing it more tax revenue. Lowering tax rates for Amazon while keeping them high for other businesses is either an admission that their high tax rates lower net tax revenue from other businesses, or that they're unfairly giving preferential treatment to Amazon.
Everyone loves to complain about the 1% lobbying for tax loopholes which reduce their overall tax burden. This is the exact same thing. Every business operating in a city should have to pay the same tax rates.
In any case, the most "optimistic" comparison (from the EV point of view) it gets total fossil-to-wheels efficiency of.6*.8=48%. The most pessimistic is.37*.8=30%. The former figure is lower than total ICE efficiency, while the latter figure is comparable. The statistics from the Guardian link above (which have the ICE use 3.7 times the energy per distance traveled) seems to be close to the 20% vs 80% comparison.
You're missing electricity transmission efficiency (about 95%), battery charge efficiency (about 80%, less for quick-charges), battery discharge efficiency (can't find measurements for it since it's incorporated into the EPA kWh consumption, but usually it's about the same as charging efficiency), and electric motor efficiency (about 90%).
I did the calculations here.. Based on EPA energy consumption figures (kWh and gallons) for nearly identical vehicles (Nissan Leaf vs Versa), EVs powered with fossil fuels use slightly less energy than ICE gasoline vehicles. About 19%-25% of the energy in the fuel makes it to the wheels for EVs, vs 17%-23% ICE gasoline. Diesel ICE vehicles are slightly more efficient (25%+).
The service monopolies Comcast has are not an anti-trust issue because they're government-granted service monopolies. You don't need anti-trust to dissolve that type of monopoly. The government simply has to rescind the monopoly they (foolishly) granted, and allow other cable companies to offer competing service.
The issue here isn't service; it's vertical integration. Comcast provides cable TV service, but also controls some of the content to be distributed over that service (they own NBC). That allows them to leverage control in one market (NBC content) to gain more share in another market (service, because you can only see certain NBC sports content if you use Comcast's service). That degrades the effectiveness of allowing alternate cable companies to provide competing service in the area. Even if other cable companies are allowed to provide service, fewer people will want to use them if their lineup doesn't include NBC because Comcast won't license to them.
The utility model you want here is what's used for gas and electric service. One company is awarded the service contract to construct and maintain the lines, but they are prohibited from offering service over those lines. Instead, they must sell access to the lines at the same rate to anyone wishing to provide gas/electricity.
Switching to EVs does very little good if 95% of your electricity generation is via fossil fuels. All you're doing is shifting the CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack. The overall energy efficiency of EVs powered by fossil fuels is barely better than ICE vehicles - the main reason EVs are cheaper to operate is because coal is an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline.
For EVs to be effective at combating CO2 emissions, you have to first switch your electricity generation so it's predominantly nuclear and renewables.
If airliner travel were purely capitalistic, you would get a seat proportional to your height and weight, with a higher ticket price for bigger seating.
Air travel is in the situation it's in because it follows the socialist concept that everyone should pay the same price for a seat, regardless of their height or weight.
Most of the profit comes from the business and first class seats. The economy seats are just there to fill out the rest of the plane at-cost, because there aren't enough first- or business-class passengers to fill out an entire plane. But when I hear other passengers complain in economy class, it's that business and first class are unfair privileges for the well off, and should be eliminated. Yeah you could eliminate them. But then your economy class seat would cost 50%-100% more. It's like people complaining about first adopters buying flat screen TVs for $18,000. Those rich first adopters buying those ridiculously priced early TVs is what allowed the TV manufacturers to pay for R&D to give you the $300 flatscreen TVs we have today.
I'm 5'8" so legroom has never been that much of an issue for me. My problem is that my shoulders are too wide for seats. It's extremely uncomfortable if you fly on short notice, get stuck in the middle, and are next to two average sized males.
Boeing and Airbus try to prevent airlines from shrinking seat width by making their cabins wide enough to give passengers extra shoulder room, but not wide enough to squeeze in an extra seat across. Unfortunately, this strategy becomes less effective the wider the cabin. And most of the growth in the airliner industry lately has been in widebody planes (777, 787, A350).
Most airlines already offer seating with more legroom. Economy Plus, Comfort Plus, Premium Economy, etc. You pay a little extra (about $50-$100 from what I've seen) and you get a few more inches of legroom (and get to sit closer to the front, which seems to be the more desired section).
So the complainers already have a solution at hand - pay a little more for more space. That they choose the cheaper, cramped seats means they're voting against more space. "Public wants bigger seats" is only true when coupled with "at no extra cost." Which is an economic impossibility.
If you have lots of cars but few bikes, then bikes will be faster because cars will be stuck in gridlock.
But if you have lots of bikes but few cars, then cars will be faster because cars won't be gridlocked.
It's like people who cite the low price of electricity overnight as a reason for buying an EV. Well yeah, that's the way it is now. But if everyone buys an EV and charges it overnight, then the new peak electricity use period will be overnight, and the overnight electricity prices will then be the highest, rather than the way it is now. You can't look at a situation, and just assume all other factors will remain the same if you make a single major change to it. You have to consider what changes will be caused by the change you make. The secondary changes are sometimes big enough to wipe out or even reverse the gains of the primary change you're thinking of making.
They compared delivery times by car vs bike under current traffic conditions. It does not necessarily support the conclusion bike advocates are pushing. Peak efficiency is usually at a specific combination of solutions - x% bikes, y% cars. Depending on which side of that peak you lie, bikes may be faster than cars, or cars may be faster than bikes. What TFA really found is that at current levels of car and bike use, most cities and towns sit on the side where bikes are on average faster during the times when people order those delivery services most. Unlike a business with demand spikes around meal times, cities have to build streets with 24 hours/day of car use in mind. Which means to them the optimal solution is too much capacity at night, about right amount during the day, not enough during spikes like meal times.
It's because the credit card companies don't want to pay for fraud. Right now they've gamed it so merchants pay for credit card fraud (merchant loses the merchandise, and the payment gets reversed). Chip + PIN basically makes it impossible for the merchant to be at fault in case of fraud, meaning either the cardholder or credit card company has to pay for fraud. So they gimped the chip in the U.S. by making it chip + sign, meaning it's still the merchant's responsibility to check the signature with the one on the card. And if they forget (or in the case of online orders, can't) and it turns out to be a fraudulent charge, the merchant has to pay for it.
(And if you're one of those people who've been duped into thinking the high interest rates pay for fraud, no they don't. They pay for cardholders who are delinquent on payments.)
Google gives you unlimited storage of pictures up to 2048x2048 resolution. You can set up the Google Photos app to make instant cloud backups of any photos you take with your cell phone, which for most people will be good enough, with them manually copying the full-res photo if they take a particularly good one. (They also give you unlimited backup of videos though I'm not sure of the size and length restrictions.)
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, it includes Prime Photos which gives you unlimited storage of photos of any resolution. Their Prime Photos app can also do instant cloud backups of photos taken with your cell phone. I use this to supplement my NAS and its backup (the cloud storage is off-site, in case my house burns down).
If you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage on OneDrive.
Speaking as an amateur photographer, I only considered about 1 in 30 photos to be "keepers". About 1 in 300 as standout. This ratio seems to hold even for professional photographers (National Geographic did a story on this, and their photographers said they shot about 5000-7000 photos for a story, to produce the dozen photos which made it into a magazine story). So the fact that I have over 10,000 slides and negatives in a storage box doesn't necessarily mean I'd want to scan/store 10,000 photos. It's more a logistical matter of not being able to separate the good photos from the bad on a negative strip, or from a box of slides organized by date/event. (I did scan most of them 15 years ago, but the HDD died - that was the incident which made me OCD about keeping backups.)
I usually saw these on places like eBay, where the seller would advertise them with the game name in big bold letters, and in the fine print mention that it was a guide, not the game or its manual.
Pre-Internet there was some market for these. Back then, if you got stuck in a game and your friends couldn't help, buying a guide was usually the only way to move on. It became a decision between flushing $50 down the drain because you were stuck in the game, or paying an extra $20 so you could continue to enjoy the $50 you'd spent on the game.
The war on adblockers is a lost cause. Breaking adblockers is not going to result in higher clickthrough rates. It never has, in the entire time it's been around.
Two hunters are out in the woods when they run across a huge grizzly bear which rears up ready to charge them. One hunter stoops down and starts tying his shoelaces. The other hunter says "What are you doing? We have to get away from the bear!" The first hunter says "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."
That's the situation the people trying to defeat ad blockers are in. They don't have to completely defeat the ad blockers; they just have to do a better job of it than anyone else in order to attract advertising business. So even if the click-through rate is down for the industry overall, if your anti-ad-blocker company's click-through rate is down less than everyone else, it's still a win for you.
That's the inherent flaw in ad blockers right now. They all try to block the ad, which just results in the advertiser trying to find a way to get around the block. To really be effective, you have to ask yourself why the advertiser is trying to show you the ad, then thwart that. Advertisers show you ads because the money they make from the few click-throughs is greater than the cost of the ad. So instead of trying to block ads, we should be trying to drive up the cost of showing ads. Fake impressions (loads ad but doesn't show it), fake click-throughs, and referral replacement (each family sets themselves up as a referrer and their computer auto-inserts their own referral code). That'll reduce the the key figure driving the ads - sales per impression / click-through / referral. Making ads appear to not be cost-effective anymore.
The Mac Mini is made using laptop parts. AFAIK, there are no socketed mobile CPUs anymore - they're all soldered. This is done to keep power consumption (and thus cooling requirement) to a minimum, allowing a smaller total package.
The lack of a M.2 socket for a SSD is a big negative. But Apple has been going with non-Samsung NAND lately with pathetic 4k read/write speeds. 10-20 MB/s vs 30-70 MB/s for the Samsung SSDs (even the EVOs). So preventing owners from upgrading the storage is probably their strategy to keep users from realizing how they're being ripped off. With SSDs, it's the slowest benchmark speed which makes the biggest difference in performance, since that corresponds with the operations which keep you waiting longest..
If any line employment had done the same things, they would've been fired immediately sent packing, with a note added to their HR record to deny them severance and unemployment. But a high-level executive does it, and the company tries to cover it up, and when they can't anymore the person is let go with a $90 million golden parachute.
The problem isn't the policies. It's the uneven application of the policies. It's not limited to sexual harassment either. High-level execs regularly seem to be let go with a golden parachute following a myriad of things (fraud, embezzlement, etc) that would sink the career of a regular employee.* Revamping the policies won't make the slightest difference if they're still not applied evenly.
* This makes me suspect we need a law saying being let go for unethical behavior automatically nullifies any severance terms you've negotiated in your employment contract.
The average American drives 13,476 miles each year. If they're spending 321 hours in their car each year, that works out to an average speed of 42 MPH. That's hardly bogged down by traffic, especially if you factor in time spent on local streets. I average about 20-25 MPH on local roads (after accounting for red lights). So if you figure half my commute time is on local streets, half on the highway, then I'm averaging 61.5 MPH on the highway.
The "problem" isn't traffic. It's suburbanization and high housing prices at workplace locations, forcing people to live much further from their workplace than in the past. Public transportation is great for countering excessive traffic, but less effective at countering long commute distances (the bus or train is stuck between having few stops so less time is wasted waiting, and maintaining frequent stops so you don't have to walk far when you get to your destination car-less).
It's also worth pointing out that the average (mean) for open-ended quantities (like time spent in a car per year - capped at 8760 hours) is skewed towards the high end by the few extreme persons. If 9 people in a room make $50k/yr, and the 10th person makes $5 million/yr, the average income for everyone in the room is $545k/yr. So the median number of hours spent in the car will be lower (probably a lot lower) than 321 hours.
A big reason for this is because cities don't want to foot the bill for installing a light at a street for a new development. So they frequently negotiate for the developer to pay for purchasing and installing the traffic signal at the street (it becomes part of the cost for the development project). The developer does so but times the light to be most favorable for people going to/from their development project, to the detriment of through-traffic. So if they install a light for a new road leading to a housing development, any car arriving at the left turn lane to head into the development will cause opposing traffic to immediately get a red light, so the car making the left turn barely has to wait. Likewise for someone leaving the development - any car on the leaving side of the road immediately triggers a red light for all cross traffic, so the people leaving the development don't have to wait.
This is a problem I've noticed is becoming more common. The disinformation campaign by the *IAA is working so well, that many naive members of the public assume any copying of books/music/movies is wrong unless it's authorized by the owner (or former owner for works that are now public domain).
It's important to stress that the natural state is for no restrictions on copying. The sole purpose of putting restrictions on copying things (Copyright) is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". A restriction on copying which does not promote that purpose (like stamping out all copies of old video games in the wild so they're lost forever if the Copyright holder's own copy is lost) has no valid reason for existing.
I wonder if an "ignore" feature would work for Wikipedia. Like on forums where if you put someone on ignore, it auto-hides all their posts. If you have a contributor on ignore, any edits they've made could be undone in the version of Wikipedia you see. Non-editors could then trade blacklists of known stupid/ignorant/troublesome editors they could auto-apply to the version of Wikipedia they see. Wikipedia could make public a ranked list of most-ignored editors.
This would basically give Wikipedia users a vote on who they think are (not) making valuable contributions, shifting the incentive for editors from the current "he who edits last wins" to "he who satisfies the most readers wins."
Up until the last few years, the main reason to upgrade smartphones was increased capability. 3G, then 4G (LTE). Larger screens (by shrinking the bezel so there's no increase in phone size). Faster processors and more RAM/storage. Better battery life (which sadly manufacturers exploited to make already too-thin phones thinner). You cannot get these things without replacing the phone.
If you actually use your smartphone extensively (i.e. not as just a phone), It's only in the last few years that it's become technologically feasible to hold onto one for more than about 3 years. I upgraded from a 3 year old Nexus 5 to a new phone last year, and the increase in performance was substantial.
Going forward, we've pretty much reached the point where phones are "good enough" for everyone but power users. 5G won't offer much benefit to the end-user over 4G. Screens are now bezel-less and span the full width of the phone. Like desktops and laptops, processors have become "fast enough" for 98% of users. Same with storage, with 256 GB microSD cards approaching $50. And my new phone is thin enough that I'm contemplating buying an always-connected battery pack which will give me 2-3 days of use between charges.
So Google's 3-year support period didn't really bug me with the older phones (I upgraded every 2.5-3 years anyway just to get new features). But it will peeve me if they don't lengthen it to 5- or 7-years soon.
The reason capitalism creates economic prosperity is because it allows people to act at the individual level to eliminate economic inefficiencies. When you mandate economic equality, that destroy's the economy's way of signaling where the inefficiencies are, and eliminates the individual's reward for eliminating an inefficiency that they do happen to find. The net result is a per capita productivity which is a lot worse ("everyone is poor") than one where inequality is allowed and in fact encouraged.
This doesn't mean you can't try to moderate the inequality to prevent it from becoming obscene. And certainly corner cases exist where equality is the optimal solution, or inequality causes a destructive feedback loop.. But trying to make everyone economically equal will kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. "Socialist" Europe is actually mostly capitalist with a small amount of moderating socialism. A little bit more socialism than the U.S., enough to put them slightly below the U.S. in GDP per capita. But that's OK if their people are OK with that slight loss in productivity for greater equality. Just don't make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that because a little equality is good, that means a lot of equality is better.
The problem stems from the Reagan-era budget cuts closing down mental health institutions aka insane asylums. (Reagan-era because although Reagan spearheaded it, control of Congress was split at the time so it couldn't have been done without the cooperation of both parties.) The hope was to divest the Federal government from mental health care (it's not listed in the Constitution as a responsibility of the Federal government) and put it back in the hands of the states (the downside of the 10th Amendment for the states). But the states never picked up the ball.
Consequently, about 25% of the homeless are people with severe mental health issues (vs about 4% for the general population). Add to that about 30%-40% who are addicted to drugs or alcohol (vs 10% for the general population). The large prevalence of mentally ill and substance abusers among the homeless prejudices people against the homeless in general, making recovery harder for the about 50% who are homeless simply because they've hit a rough patch in their lives.
At a city or county level, it's usually cheaper to simply boot the homeless out than to really tackle the issue. But that doesn't reduce the rate of homelessness, it merely hides it from view (in those cities). Just like a burglar alarm may reduce the chances of your house being robbed, but doesn't reduce the overall burglary rate (the burglar flees your home and robs another house instead). The problem really needs to be addressed at the state or national level for an effective solution - geographic areas large enough that simply booting them out doesn't appear to be a solution to legislators.
Apple sued Samsung with its design patents, requesting a percentage of each Samsung device's selling price as a royalty for licensing their patents. Meanwhile most of Samsung's patents were FRAND - included in a standard so licensed at just a few cents per device. Apple refused to do a patent cross-licensing deal with Samsung for this reason, claiming their patents were much more valuable. Apple also exploited the inability of Samsung to get an injunction based on its FRAND patents (an injunction forces a patent violator to stop selling). Apple basically sold devices containing Samsung's patented tech without paying Samsung any royalties during the negotiations and litigation, claiming they were FRAND and the royalty rate just hadn't been negotiated yet.
The natural response to this type of caustic approach to patent negotiations is to dilute the value of FRAND patents. Companies won't want to license their patents under FRAND anymore because of how limited they are when it comes to cross-license negotiations. Which is exactly what Qualcomm is trying to do. You piss on patent holders licensing under FRAND, you everyone from licensing under FRAND.
They'll request a percentage of your device's selling price instead.
I'm actually on Apple's side on this one - patents like Qualcomm's which are required to implement an industry-standard tech should be licensed as FRAND. But this is a bed Apple themselves made, and I'm not crying over them being made to lie in it.
The doctors who I do IT for estimate they spend roughly two hours doing HIPAA-compliant documentation for each hour seeing patients (same as TFA). The question is, is that a good ratio? All of them say they could be doing more good if they could see more patients, and spend less time documenting. As they themselves are the people who are supposed to be benefiting from the additional documentation (they receive the full patient history if a patient transfers from another doctor to themselves), you have to figure they're in the best position to gauge what the best ratio is.
This isn't a binary good/bad thing as you're making it out to be, where they should be documenting everything because "IT'S PART OF THEIR JOB." The question is, is the current amount of documentation the correct amount? If HIPAA is requiring too much documentation, then the doctor is wasting his/her time asking the patient for and entering details into the EMR which will never be relevant to the patient's future medical needs. Time the doctor could be using to see other patients or research puzzling symptoms.
The impression I get is that the HIPAA requirements were made by people who couldn't stand the idea of a single patient suffering or dying because a doctor forgot to note some seemingly-irrelevant detail which later turns out to be important. As a result, they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the HIPAA documentation requirements. At some point, additional documentation becomes detrimental to the average quality of care. It may save the extreme corner cases where a single patient who got hit by a bumper car dies because of an allergy to a type of paint used only on amusement park bumper cars. But it comes at the cost of the huge amount of time wasted requiring every doctor to query and document that level of detail. Beyond a certain point, a simple follow-up phone call to the patient for additional details IF it turns out that it might be relevant, turns out to be more efficient than requiring every doctor to ask and document it every time.
Documentation has a cost, and the more documentation you require, the higher the cost. You can really screw things up if you ignore that cost because you rationalize that all documentation is always justified because "IT'S PART OF THEIR JOB."
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I tried to stay on 1511 because the 1703 update broke a bunch of my program icons (turned them into generic icons even when I specifically selected the program icon), and for some reason prevented me from reinstalling those programs to fix the icons. I used on of the common tricks to block the update. For the first few months it worked. Then I started getting warnings every day that security support for 1511 had ended and I needed to update to 1703 to continue to get security updates. Eventually, all the tricks I'd used to prevent the update (disable the Windows Update service, set my connection to metered) stopped working. The Windows Update service would auto-enable itself and begin auto-downloading the 1703 update (3 GB) and trying to install it. And every time my program icons were still broken so I'd have to roll it back.
It auto-downloaded so many times that I was in danger of going over my monthly quota from my ISP, and I had to switch to using my phone's hotspot for Internet (where it still downloaded, but slowly enough that it wasn't trying to auto-update every few hours). Eventually I put aside an afternoon, updated, wrote down the name of every program whose icon was broken, rolled it back, reinstalled all those programs, then let Windows update to 1803. That seemed to fix the icons, although i still can't reinstall/repair any of those programs (guess I'll have to wipe and reinstall from scratch if that becomes an issue).
Anyhow, security updates for 1703 ended on October 9. So expect to experience the above strong-arm tactics to force you to upgrade in the coming months.
No it didn't operate in its own best interests. Having a different tax rate Amazon negotiated for itself is inherently unfair to other businesses operating in the city. If a city thinks it can get a net tax increase if they can attract Amazon by offering it a lower tax rate, then that exact same reasoning applies to all businesses, not just Amazon. And "their own best interest" would be to lower the tax rate for everyone. Lots of small businesses would then set up in NYC instead of elsewhere, providing it more tax revenue. Lowering tax rates for Amazon while keeping them high for other businesses is either an admission that their high tax rates lower net tax revenue from other businesses, or that they're unfairly giving preferential treatment to Amazon.
Everyone loves to complain about the 1% lobbying for tax loopholes which reduce their overall tax burden. This is the exact same thing. Every business operating in a city should have to pay the same tax rates.
You're missing electricity transmission efficiency (about 95%), battery charge efficiency (about 80%, less for quick-charges), battery discharge efficiency (can't find measurements for it since it's incorporated into the EPA kWh consumption, but usually it's about the same as charging efficiency), and electric motor efficiency (about 90%).
I did the calculations here.. Based on EPA energy consumption figures (kWh and gallons) for nearly identical vehicles (Nissan Leaf vs Versa), EVs powered with fossil fuels use slightly less energy than ICE gasoline vehicles. About 19%-25% of the energy in the fuel makes it to the wheels for EVs, vs 17%-23% ICE gasoline. Diesel ICE vehicles are slightly more efficient (25%+).
The service monopolies Comcast has are not an anti-trust issue because they're government-granted service monopolies. You don't need anti-trust to dissolve that type of monopoly. The government simply has to rescind the monopoly they (foolishly) granted, and allow other cable companies to offer competing service.
The issue here isn't service; it's vertical integration. Comcast provides cable TV service, but also controls some of the content to be distributed over that service (they own NBC). That allows them to leverage control in one market (NBC content) to gain more share in another market (service, because you can only see certain NBC sports content if you use Comcast's service). That degrades the effectiveness of allowing alternate cable companies to provide competing service in the area. Even if other cable companies are allowed to provide service, fewer people will want to use them if their lineup doesn't include NBC because Comcast won't license to them.
The utility model you want here is what's used for gas and electric service. One company is awarded the service contract to construct and maintain the lines, but they are prohibited from offering service over those lines. Instead, they must sell access to the lines at the same rate to anyone wishing to provide gas/electricity.
Switching to EVs does very little good if 95% of your electricity generation is via fossil fuels. All you're doing is shifting the CO2 emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestack. The overall energy efficiency of EVs powered by fossil fuels is barely better than ICE vehicles - the main reason EVs are cheaper to operate is because coal is an order of magnitude cheaper per Joule than gasoline.
For EVs to be effective at combating CO2 emissions, you have to first switch your electricity generation so it's predominantly nuclear and renewables.
If airliner travel were purely capitalistic, you would get a seat proportional to your height and weight, with a higher ticket price for bigger seating.
Air travel is in the situation it's in because it follows the socialist concept that everyone should pay the same price for a seat, regardless of their height or weight.
Boeing and Airbus try to prevent airlines from shrinking seat width by making their cabins wide enough to give passengers extra shoulder room, but not wide enough to squeeze in an extra seat across. Unfortunately, this strategy becomes less effective the wider the cabin. And most of the growth in the airliner industry lately has been in widebody planes (777, 787, A350).
Most airlines already offer seating with more legroom. Economy Plus, Comfort Plus, Premium Economy, etc. You pay a little extra (about $50-$100 from what I've seen) and you get a few more inches of legroom (and get to sit closer to the front, which seems to be the more desired section).
So the complainers already have a solution at hand - pay a little more for more space. That they choose the cheaper, cramped seats means they're voting against more space. "Public wants bigger seats" is only true when coupled with "at no extra cost." Which is an economic impossibility.
It's like people who cite the low price of electricity overnight as a reason for buying an EV. Well yeah, that's the way it is now. But if everyone buys an EV and charges it overnight, then the new peak electricity use period will be overnight, and the overnight electricity prices will then be the highest, rather than the way it is now. You can't look at a situation, and just assume all other factors will remain the same if you make a single major change to it. You have to consider what changes will be caused by the change you make. The secondary changes are sometimes big enough to wipe out or even reverse the gains of the primary change you're thinking of making.
They compared delivery times by car vs bike under current traffic conditions. It does not necessarily support the conclusion bike advocates are pushing. Peak efficiency is usually at a specific combination of solutions - x% bikes, y% cars. Depending on which side of that peak you lie, bikes may be faster than cars, or cars may be faster than bikes. What TFA really found is that at current levels of car and bike use, most cities and towns sit on the side where bikes are on average faster during the times when people order those delivery services most. Unlike a business with demand spikes around meal times, cities have to build streets with 24 hours/day of car use in mind. Which means to them the optimal solution is too much capacity at night, about right amount during the day, not enough during spikes like meal times.
It's because the credit card companies don't want to pay for fraud. Right now they've gamed it so merchants pay for credit card fraud (merchant loses the merchandise, and the payment gets reversed). Chip + PIN basically makes it impossible for the merchant to be at fault in case of fraud, meaning either the cardholder or credit card company has to pay for fraud. So they gimped the chip in the U.S. by making it chip + sign, meaning it's still the merchant's responsibility to check the signature with the one on the card. And if they forget (or in the case of online orders, can't) and it turns out to be a fraudulent charge, the merchant has to pay for it.
(And if you're one of those people who've been duped into thinking the high interest rates pay for fraud, no they don't. They pay for cardholders who are delinquent on payments.)
OS X is a modified version of BSD Unix. Just pop up a terminal in OS X and you have a good old Unix shell.
Google gives you unlimited storage of pictures up to 2048x2048 resolution. You can set up the Google Photos app to make instant cloud backups of any photos you take with your cell phone, which for most people will be good enough, with them manually copying the full-res photo if they take a particularly good one. (They also give you unlimited backup of videos though I'm not sure of the size and length restrictions.)
If you subscribe to Amazon Prime, it includes Prime Photos which gives you unlimited storage of photos of any resolution. Their Prime Photos app can also do instant cloud backups of photos taken with your cell phone. I use this to supplement my NAS and its backup (the cloud storage is off-site, in case my house burns down).
If you subscribe to Office 365, it includes 1 TB of cloud storage on OneDrive.
Speaking as an amateur photographer, I only considered about 1 in 30 photos to be "keepers". About 1 in 300 as standout. This ratio seems to hold even for professional photographers (National Geographic did a story on this, and their photographers said they shot about 5000-7000 photos for a story, to produce the dozen photos which made it into a magazine story). So the fact that I have over 10,000 slides and negatives in a storage box doesn't necessarily mean I'd want to scan/store 10,000 photos. It's more a logistical matter of not being able to separate the good photos from the bad on a negative strip, or from a box of slides organized by date/event. (I did scan most of them 15 years ago, but the HDD died - that was the incident which made me OCD about keeping backups.)
I usually saw these on places like eBay, where the seller would advertise them with the game name in big bold letters, and in the fine print mention that it was a guide, not the game or its manual.
Pre-Internet there was some market for these. Back then, if you got stuck in a game and your friends couldn't help, buying a guide was usually the only way to move on. It became a decision between flushing $50 down the drain because you were stuck in the game, or paying an extra $20 so you could continue to enjoy the $50 you'd spent on the game.
Two hunters are out in the woods when they run across a huge grizzly bear which rears up ready to charge them. One hunter stoops down and starts tying his shoelaces. The other hunter says "What are you doing? We have to get away from the bear!" The first hunter says "I don't have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you."
That's the situation the people trying to defeat ad blockers are in. They don't have to completely defeat the ad blockers; they just have to do a better job of it than anyone else in order to attract advertising business. So even if the click-through rate is down for the industry overall, if your anti-ad-blocker company's click-through rate is down less than everyone else, it's still a win for you.
That's the inherent flaw in ad blockers right now. They all try to block the ad, which just results in the advertiser trying to find a way to get around the block. To really be effective, you have to ask yourself why the advertiser is trying to show you the ad, then thwart that. Advertisers show you ads because the money they make from the few click-throughs is greater than the cost of the ad. So instead of trying to block ads, we should be trying to drive up the cost of showing ads. Fake impressions (loads ad but doesn't show it), fake click-throughs, and referral replacement (each family sets themselves up as a referrer and their computer auto-inserts their own referral code). That'll reduce the the key figure driving the ads - sales per impression / click-through / referral. Making ads appear to not be cost-effective anymore.
The Mac Mini is made using laptop parts. AFAIK, there are no socketed mobile CPUs anymore - they're all soldered. This is done to keep power consumption (and thus cooling requirement) to a minimum, allowing a smaller total package.
The lack of a M.2 socket for a SSD is a big negative. But Apple has been going with non-Samsung NAND lately with pathetic 4k read/write speeds. 10-20 MB/s vs 30-70 MB/s for the Samsung SSDs (even the EVOs). So preventing owners from upgrading the storage is probably their strategy to keep users from realizing how they're being ripped off. With SSDs, it's the slowest benchmark speed which makes the biggest difference in performance, since that corresponds with the operations which keep you waiting longest..
If any line employment had done the same things, they would've been fired immediately sent packing, with a note added to their HR record to deny them severance and unemployment. But a high-level executive does it, and the company tries to cover it up, and when they can't anymore the person is let go with a $90 million golden parachute.
The problem isn't the policies. It's the uneven application of the policies. It's not limited to sexual harassment either. High-level execs regularly seem to be let go with a golden parachute following a myriad of things (fraud, embezzlement, etc) that would sink the career of a regular employee.* Revamping the policies won't make the slightest difference if they're still not applied evenly.
* This makes me suspect we need a law saying being let go for unethical behavior automatically nullifies any severance terms you've negotiated in your employment contract.
The average American drives 13,476 miles each year. If they're spending 321 hours in their car each year, that works out to an average speed of 42 MPH. That's hardly bogged down by traffic, especially if you factor in time spent on local streets. I average about 20-25 MPH on local roads (after accounting for red lights). So if you figure half my commute time is on local streets, half on the highway, then I'm averaging 61.5 MPH on the highway.
The "problem" isn't traffic. It's suburbanization and high housing prices at workplace locations, forcing people to live much further from their workplace than in the past. Public transportation is great for countering excessive traffic, but less effective at countering long commute distances (the bus or train is stuck between having few stops so less time is wasted waiting, and maintaining frequent stops so you don't have to walk far when you get to your destination car-less).
It's also worth pointing out that the average (mean) for open-ended quantities (like time spent in a car per year - capped at 8760 hours) is skewed towards the high end by the few extreme persons. If 9 people in a room make $50k/yr, and the 10th person makes $5 million/yr, the average income for everyone in the room is $545k/yr. So the median number of hours spent in the car will be lower (probably a lot lower) than 321 hours.
A big reason for this is because cities don't want to foot the bill for installing a light at a street for a new development. So they frequently negotiate for the developer to pay for purchasing and installing the traffic signal at the street (it becomes part of the cost for the development project). The developer does so but times the light to be most favorable for people going to/from their development project, to the detriment of through-traffic. So if they install a light for a new road leading to a housing development, any car arriving at the left turn lane to head into the development will cause opposing traffic to immediately get a red light, so the car making the left turn barely has to wait. Likewise for someone leaving the development - any car on the leaving side of the road immediately triggers a red light for all cross traffic, so the people leaving the development don't have to wait.
This is a problem I've noticed is becoming more common. The disinformation campaign by the *IAA is working so well, that many naive members of the public assume any copying of books/music/movies is wrong unless it's authorized by the owner (or former owner for works that are now public domain).
It's important to stress that the natural state is for no restrictions on copying. The sole purpose of putting restrictions on copying things (Copyright) is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts". A restriction on copying which does not promote that purpose (like stamping out all copies of old video games in the wild so they're lost forever if the Copyright holder's own copy is lost) has no valid reason for existing.
I wonder if an "ignore" feature would work for Wikipedia. Like on forums where if you put someone on ignore, it auto-hides all their posts. If you have a contributor on ignore, any edits they've made could be undone in the version of Wikipedia you see. Non-editors could then trade blacklists of known stupid/ignorant/troublesome editors they could auto-apply to the version of Wikipedia they see. Wikipedia could make public a ranked list of most-ignored editors.
This would basically give Wikipedia users a vote on who they think are (not) making valuable contributions, shifting the incentive for editors from the current "he who edits last wins" to "he who satisfies the most readers wins."
Up until the last few years, the main reason to upgrade smartphones was increased capability. 3G, then 4G (LTE). Larger screens (by shrinking the bezel so there's no increase in phone size). Faster processors and more RAM/storage. Better battery life (which sadly manufacturers exploited to make already too-thin phones thinner). You cannot get these things without replacing the phone.
If you actually use your smartphone extensively (i.e. not as just a phone), It's only in the last few years that it's become technologically feasible to hold onto one for more than about 3 years. I upgraded from a 3 year old Nexus 5 to a new phone last year, and the increase in performance was substantial.
Going forward, we've pretty much reached the point where phones are "good enough" for everyone but power users. 5G won't offer much benefit to the end-user over 4G. Screens are now bezel-less and span the full width of the phone. Like desktops and laptops, processors have become "fast enough" for 98% of users. Same with storage, with 256 GB microSD cards approaching $50. And my new phone is thin enough that I'm contemplating buying an always-connected battery pack which will give me 2-3 days of use between charges.
So Google's 3-year support period didn't really bug me with the older phones (I upgraded every 2.5-3 years anyway just to get new features). But it will peeve me if they don't lengthen it to 5- or 7-years soon.
The reason capitalism creates economic prosperity is because it allows people to act at the individual level to eliminate economic inefficiencies. When you mandate economic equality, that destroy's the economy's way of signaling where the inefficiencies are, and eliminates the individual's reward for eliminating an inefficiency that they do happen to find. The net result is a per capita productivity which is a lot worse ("everyone is poor") than one where inequality is allowed and in fact encouraged.
This doesn't mean you can't try to moderate the inequality to prevent it from becoming obscene. And certainly corner cases exist where equality is the optimal solution, or inequality causes a destructive feedback loop.. But trying to make everyone economically equal will kill the goose which lays the golden eggs. "Socialist" Europe is actually mostly capitalist with a small amount of moderating socialism. A little bit more socialism than the U.S., enough to put them slightly below the U.S. in GDP per capita. But that's OK if their people are OK with that slight loss in productivity for greater equality. Just don't make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that because a little equality is good, that means a lot of equality is better.
The problem stems from the Reagan-era budget cuts closing down mental health institutions aka insane asylums. (Reagan-era because although Reagan spearheaded it, control of Congress was split at the time so it couldn't have been done without the cooperation of both parties.) The hope was to divest the Federal government from mental health care (it's not listed in the Constitution as a responsibility of the Federal government) and put it back in the hands of the states (the downside of the 10th Amendment for the states). But the states never picked up the ball.
Consequently, about 25% of the homeless are people with severe mental health issues (vs about 4% for the general population). Add to that about 30%-40% who are addicted to drugs or alcohol (vs 10% for the general population). The large prevalence of mentally ill and substance abusers among the homeless prejudices people against the homeless in general, making recovery harder for the about 50% who are homeless simply because they've hit a rough patch in their lives.
At a city or county level, it's usually cheaper to simply boot the homeless out than to really tackle the issue. But that doesn't reduce the rate of homelessness, it merely hides it from view (in those cities). Just like a burglar alarm may reduce the chances of your house being robbed, but doesn't reduce the overall burglary rate (the burglar flees your home and robs another house instead). The problem really needs to be addressed at the state or national level for an effective solution - geographic areas large enough that simply booting them out doesn't appear to be a solution to legislators.
Apple sued Samsung with its design patents, requesting a percentage of each Samsung device's selling price as a royalty for licensing their patents. Meanwhile most of Samsung's patents were FRAND - included in a standard so licensed at just a few cents per device. Apple refused to do a patent cross-licensing deal with Samsung for this reason, claiming their patents were much more valuable. Apple also exploited the inability of Samsung to get an injunction based on its FRAND patents (an injunction forces a patent violator to stop selling). Apple basically sold devices containing Samsung's patented tech without paying Samsung any royalties during the negotiations and litigation, claiming they were FRAND and the royalty rate just hadn't been negotiated yet.
The natural response to this type of caustic approach to patent negotiations is to dilute the value of FRAND patents. Companies won't want to license their patents under FRAND anymore because of how limited they are when it comes to cross-license negotiations. Which is exactly what Qualcomm is trying to do. You piss on patent holders licensing under FRAND, you everyone from licensing under FRAND. They'll request a percentage of your device's selling price instead.
I'm actually on Apple's side on this one - patents like Qualcomm's which are required to implement an industry-standard tech should be licensed as FRAND. But this is a bed Apple themselves made, and I'm not crying over them being made to lie in it.
The doctors who I do IT for estimate they spend roughly two hours doing HIPAA-compliant documentation for each hour seeing patients (same as TFA). The question is, is that a good ratio? All of them say they could be doing more good if they could see more patients, and spend less time documenting. As they themselves are the people who are supposed to be benefiting from the additional documentation (they receive the full patient history if a patient transfers from another doctor to themselves), you have to figure they're in the best position to gauge what the best ratio is.
This isn't a binary good/bad thing as you're making it out to be, where they should be documenting everything because "IT'S PART OF THEIR JOB." The question is, is the current amount of documentation the correct amount? If HIPAA is requiring too much documentation, then the doctor is wasting his/her time asking the patient for and entering details into the EMR which will never be relevant to the patient's future medical needs. Time the doctor could be using to see other patients or research puzzling symptoms.
The impression I get is that the HIPAA requirements were made by people who couldn't stand the idea of a single patient suffering or dying because a doctor forgot to note some seemingly-irrelevant detail which later turns out to be important. As a result, they threw everything including the kitchen sink into the HIPAA documentation requirements. At some point, additional documentation becomes detrimental to the average quality of care. It may save the extreme corner cases where a single patient who got hit by a bumper car dies because of an allergy to a type of paint used only on amusement park bumper cars. But it comes at the cost of the huge amount of time wasted requiring every doctor to query and document that level of detail. Beyond a certain point, a simple follow-up phone call to the patient for additional details IF it turns out that it might be relevant, turns out to be more efficient than requiring every doctor to ask and document it every time.
Documentation has a cost, and the more documentation you require, the higher the cost. You can really screw things up if you ignore that cost because you rationalize that all documentation is always justified because "IT'S PART OF THEIR JOB."