If Americans were actually getting paid relative to their productivity then they'd have the wherewithal to afford locally sourced products, even at double or triple the price of imports. [...] We need to fix the income inequality in our country first,
U.S. income distribution is actually pretty good. Certainly not at European levels, but it's a myth that the 1% control U.S. income. Income stats are readily available from the iRS. The top 1% (about $500k/yr and above) only account for about 19% of total income. The top 5% (about $200k/yr and above) account for about 35% of total income. The problem is the top 25% (about $75k/yr and above) account for 70% of income. And the top 50% (about $38k/yr and above) account for 90% of income.
That is, the bottom 50% only make 10% of the income. So the problem is not limited to the 1%. Even if you confiscated all of the top 1%'s income and distributed it to the bottom 50%, that would only improve their share of income from 10% to 29%. If you make more than about $38k/yr, and especially if you make more than $75k/yr, you are part of the problem.
You're also incorrect in assuming that increased equality always equals more productivity. Aside from city-states and countries with disproportionate oil imports or banking industries, the U.S. leads the world in GDP per capita. That is, there isn't a linear correlation between income inequality and productivity. Extremely high income inequality like in nations with high corruption (Central America, Taiwan, South Korea, and China) reduces GDP per capita (productivity per citizen). But extremely low income inequality like in EU nations also reduces productivity per citizen. The U.S. sits at pretty much near the productivity optimum - the amount of income inequality it has is just about what you need if you wish to maximize productivity per citizen.
I liken it to the checkout lane problem. What's the quickest way to get shoppers checked out of a supermarket? Fast lanes (where a few elite shoppers get their own dedicated lanes with no waiting) obviously slow things down. But if you try to make everything equal (everyone stands in one line, and the person in front goes to the next available checkout lane, so it's impossible for someone who's waited less time to check out before you), that actually ends up being slower than if everyone just picks whichever lane they want. In the pick-your-own-lane model, inequality is higher (you sometimes get stuck in a slow lane so other people who've waited less than you get checked out before you). But on average the extra time added on due to the inequality is less than the time added due to the inefficiency of trying to make everything equal (in the one-line model, each checkout lane sits idle slightly longer while it waits for the next person to move from the one line to the register). Satisfaction is higher because people like fairness and equality, but the higher equality actually results in lower productivity.
So one can argue that income equality is a more desirable goal from a moral standpoint. But economically it is not optimal - a certain level of inequality is needed to maximize productivity per capita. We can still do it, like how we do not discriminate against physically disabled persons holding jobs (non-disabled people subsidize the cost of equipment to allow disabled persons to do those jobs). But understand that it results in lower productivity per capita, not higher.
About 15 years ago, I set up a private email server for our company. I'd been running a private email server for personal use since the 1990s so didn't think it would be that different. Was I ever wrong.
I was called numerous times after I'd gone home from work by employees working a later shift saying email wasn't working. For my personal email I'd just go to sleep and fix it the next morning But these people needed email to do their work, so I had to come back in and fix it ASAP. Then there were the numerous mail servers I had to petition to remove our server from their spam blacklists every month. Other people on our ISP sometimes had their computers compromised and used to send spam, and these servers were blocking the entire IP address range of our ISP. For my personal email, I would never need to send email to a lot of these servers so being blacklisted by them was inconsequential. But multiply it by all the mail servers 50 employees send email to, and suddenly you need to resolve all these blocks.
After a few months of this I threw in the towel, and signed us up for an outside email hosting service. They're staffed 24/7, so when email goes down someone there gets it fixed, usually within a few minutes. And clearing up spam blacklists is their problem - we just have to report the block. If your company is big enough to have IT staff on duty or on call 24/7 then I can see a private email server working out. But if your company is that big you're not going to run your email server on a $500 appliance.
A proper assessment of the emissions of a vehicle takes into account everything - including vehicle manufacturing, and production of the electricity used. But most EV advocates seem to draw an imaginary bubble around just their EV, and ignore everything that happens outside that bubble to support their EV, wrongly claiming that their EV is "zero emissions."
EVs are not zero emissions. All they do is shift the emissions from the tailpipe of a car to the smokestack of a power plant. I've been saying over and over that switching to an EV doesn't drastically change the carbon emissions from operating a vehicle. If you charge an EV with electricity generated by fossil fuels, its overall energy efficiency is pretty much the same as a gasoline ICE vehicle. Diesel ICEs are more energy efficient (more particulates, but less CO2).
For EVs to make an impact on CO2 emissions, it is imperative that we switch our power generation from coal/gas over to nuclear and renewables. Powering EVs with electricity generated from fossil fuels primarily reduces particulate pollution, and has little impact on CO2 emissions.
The 60 GHz band was opened up because it's easily absorbed by O2 oxygen molecules. That means it has high attenuation in the air, and thus low range, making it rather useless for traditional long-range radio transmission. But it's perfect for an open radio frequency, where the attenuation means your neighbor's 60 GHz transmissions are less likely to interfere with yours.
2.4 GHz was opened for the same reason (absorbed by water - how microwave ovens at 2.45 GHz work). I haven't been able to track down why 5 GHz was opened, but the fact that it's also used for doppler weather radar suggests attenuation by water as well.
Basically, any frequency which will penetrate well and thus have good range would become useless if opened up, due to interference from devices used by other people nearby. The cellular frequencies are an exception, since it's up to the cellular companies to actively manage bandwidth allocation (i.e. prevent interference) on the frequencies they leased.
monitored by a land based crew, who get to go home every night
If your ship is crewed by on-site staff, they may work an 8 hour shift, but they're basically on-call the other 16 hours. They're paid a slight premium for this, say 50%. So you're essentially getting the work of 3 employees for the cost of 1.5 since the crew is there mostly to take care of emergencies, not actually doing stuff all the time.
If your ship is "crewed" remotely by staff which go home every night, you'll need three 8-hour shifts. Increasing personnel costs by 2x.
Any labor savings is going to come from automation (i.e. eliminating human jobs) and improving reliability. Not by moving the crew off the ship. The engineer (mechanic) is along for the ride "just in case" the engines break during the voyage. If you can get engine reliability high enough, it may be an acceptable risk to forego the engineer. i.e. The rate at which you lose ships due to mechanical breakdown costs less than the payroll of having an engineer aboard every ship. You can't eliminate him in a crewed ship because the other crew will die if the ship is lost due to a breakdown. But if the ship is uncrewed, then your only losses from a breakdown are financial.
human-free ships could be 15 percent more efficient to run, because they don't need energy-gobbling life support systems, doing things like heating, cooking, and lugging drinking water along for the ride.
Heating and cooking are trivial. The ship has got huge diesel engines running 24/7 generating copious amounts of waste heat. Diesel engines on this scale are about 50% efficient. Half the energy in the fuel goes into propelling the ship. The other half becomes waste heat. The problem is getting rid of heat, not generating it (if the cooling system breaks down, the ship is dead in the water until it's fixed). Likewise, the amount of drinking water needed by a crew (about 2-4 kg per day per person) is inconsequential to the cargo capacity of the ship. Heck, if you needed you could add a bleed valve to a pressurized raw water coolant line, and venting it would cause the superheated water to flash boil, which if run through a rudimentary still would produce pure drinkable water when condensed.
The accident reduction part I could agree with, though I wonder if without having lives on the line, people might engage in riskier behavior which leads to more accidents, not fewer. I'll note that the Exxon Valdez accident happened because the company didn't want to pay to fix the radar. That kind of skimping is more likely to happen if people's lives aren't on the line, not less.
If the state requires you to use a government-issued ID to confirm your identity for voting, you can generally vote at any one of multiple polling stations. Your ID is used to confirm you only voted once.
If the state prohibits identity verification by ID, you have to go to your one designated polling station. You tell the poll workers your name and address. They have a big printed list of everyone who's supposed to vote at that polling station, and look you up to confirm that you're on it, cross off your name, and give you your ballot. The fact that your name has been crossed off the list is used to confirm that you only voted once.
Add the screwed up roll-out. Google+ Circles were the perfect solution to companies wanting to use a social media platform in-house. You could create an arbitrary number of circles and organize people (employees for a company) into whichever and multiple circles (departments, focus groups, whatever). This was the platform's killer feature that Facebook didn't have.
Except it took them more than a year to roll out Google+ to companies using Google Apps for Business (their name for using Gmail and other Google apps like Maps, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, etc. under your company's own domain name). The one place where the real-name policy wouldn't have been a negative, and they gave it lowest priority.
The main reason to use the full-blown version of Photoshop over other cheap/free photo editing tools is its handling of layers and selections. Seems like it would be painful and time-consuming to use those functions on a touch device. They make extensive use of modifiers like ctrl, shift, and alt/command to rapidly make click and click-drag do different things, avoiding constantly having to change menu options.
I've no doubt the iPad's hardware can handle it (my phone is about 50x faster and has more than a hundred times more RAM than the first computer I used Photoshop on). But simpler is not always better.
Same reason mustard gas wasn't used extensively in WWI - a shift in the wind could blow the gas over your own troops. The rationale of a terrorist is to inflict death and destruction among a target population. If a bioengineeered smallpox virus attack were successful and started an epidemic in a target country, it's almost certain to travel around the world and eventually arrive back at the terrorists' home country. As fatality rates would be higher in countries with poor medical care, and most terrorist organizations are based in developing countries, they would end up harming themselves more than their target.
The only people I could see trying to do this are anarchists, and reckless researchers or home biologists.
$18 billion per year divided by 3.8 million births per year = about $4,700 per new family. Give it to them as a tax credit, let them use it to defray medical costs, take unpaid time off to recover from birth, etc, etc, etc.
Defense spending has dropped significantly as percent of the budget since the 1960s. The bulk of the budget is now Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements. We already spend $2.6 trillion dollars per year on the types of programs you're advocating. Adding $18 billion would hardly make a difference. At this point you're advocating removing sand from a molehill to try to make a mountain bigger.
Point being, there are ways to spend the money that don't involve building murder weapons.
Point out one country which doesn't spend money on a military. There isn't, because everyone country which tried it was invaded and conquered by another country. Like it or not, the world is not unicorns and rainbows. The bottom line is that it's nearly always cheaper to forcibly take resources away from a neighbor than it is to cultivate/harvest/mine/develop them yourself. So there will always be an incentive for countries to invade and conquer other countries.
Having a military to defend yourself with is the most economically sound way to dissuade a potential invader. You have $200 billion in assets, but no defense. An invader figures they can spend $5 billion to invade you and take away your $200 billion, for a net profit (to them) of $195 billion.
But if you spend $5 billion of your assets on a military which can inflict $200 billion in damage, that changes the math. Now the invader estimates it will lose $205 billion from invading you, for a net loss of $5 billion. So they leave you alone. Yes you had to spend $5 billion, but it resulted in you not losing $200 billion.
This is an unfortunate oversight in a lot of people's thinking. They assume the status quo would continue to exist even if they eliminated one factor, ignoring how that factor contributes to the status quo. Like people who think because the air is clean, we don't need clean air regulations. The country being free from invasion is not its natural state. If you eliminate military spending and the "murder weapons" as you put it, someone else would simply waltz in and take away everything you own, probably murdering several or most of your family in the process. I know because it's what happened to my country (Korea).
U.S. military spending is huge only because the U.S. economy is huge. As percent of GDP, the U.S. doesn't even make the top 25. It only spends about 3.5% of its GDP on military spending, slightly above the world average of about 2.3%. If you factor in that the U.S. is bound by the peace treaties ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense, U.S. military spending drops to 2.8% of the combined Japan + U.S. GDP. Add in NATO (which allows European countries to underspend on their militaries - the U.S. really should've withdrawn from it at the end of the Cold War) and it's pretty much right at the world average.
Complaining that U.S. military spending is huge on the basis of its raw dollar amount is like complaining that a city of 10 million consumes 10x as much food as a city of 1 million.
H2 sits at a high energy state (elemental forms are defined as zero, most other molecules have negative Gibbs free energy, indicating a lower energy state). Generating molecules with high Gibbs free energy usually requires putting energy into the system. Since the mortar reaction drives itself (the mortar sets), more likely it forms H2O, which sits at a very low energy state (which is why water is the end product of a lot of combustion reactions).
CO2 is also a very low energy state (why it's also the end product of combustion of respiration), so converting it into nearly anything else requires putting energy in to drive the reaction up the energy gradient. Plants convert CO2 (and H2O) into glucose by using energy from sunlight (photosynthesis) to drive the reaction. Presumably this material does the same.
Also, the idea isn't completely new. Self-healing fiber reinforced polymers (like fiberglass or carbon fiber) have been made by encapsulating small amounts of the two components of epoxy (resin and hardener) separately inside the FRP. When the FRP develops a crack, some of these capsules are also broken open. The liquid resin and hardener ooze out, mix, and harden into epoxy to seal the crack. The material in TFA is a bit different in that it pulls the required materials out of the air.
I like how the post says "rights holders"... that really has very little to do with the artists.
We already have the tools today for artists not to sell their soul to record companies. Anyone can set up their own website, upload their own music to YouTube, sell albums on iTunes and the Amazon and Google equivalents. The MMA doesn't change that. It's just a matter of wannabe rock stars taking the risk of doing it on their own, instead of wanting to be handheld through the music production process by a studio who will in return rob them blind.
If you want to erect an ironclad separation between corporations and politics, then there's one further step you need to take. Do you believe in "no taxation without representation?" Most Americans do. If you do, and you also believe in taxing corporations, then you also believe corporations are entitled to representation in government. Since corporations can't vote, the only form of representation they have is (drumroll)... campaign contributions.
So to completely separate corporations and politics requires (1) not voting for anyone who accepts campaign contributions from a corporation, and (2) eliminating corporate taxes.
If you're gonna argue that corporations are made up of people, who can vote, then congratulations - you've half figured it out. Yes corporations are made up of people. And corporate taxes are paid for by those same people - via higher prices, lower wages, and lower dividends. So it doesn't really matter whether you tax corporations, or instead tax the people buying corporate products, working at corporations, and receiving dividends from corporate stock. The same people end up paying the taxes either way. Corporations are just pass-through paper entities, a facade for the people behind them - both in terms of representation and for taxation. The cleanest way to accomplish what you want still remains eliminating corporate taxes and removing the ability of corporations to donate to campaigns.
Amazon can agree to pay Wikipedia when Wikipedia agrees to pay the volunteers who maintain and update its info.
The volunteers agreed to provide that service without compensation.
Wikipedia agreed to provide its service without compensation. If it now wants to switch to a pay model (and that's what this is - wanting to be paid for the service it's providing), it's free to do so (provided it can figure out a way to placate the volunteers who gave freely of their time and labor to make Wikipedia possible). Hint: Encyclopedia Britannica already tried the pay model.
The Space Shuttle was originally proposed in the 1960s, and designed in the 1970s. Back then, spy satellites used film. After a full roll was shot, it was ejected, re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, and an elaborate system was in place to capture those film canisters in mid-air. When all the film aboard a spy satellite was used, it became a billion dollar paperweight in orbit.
The point of the Space Shuttle was to go into orbit, dock with a spy satellite, and re-load it with new film canisters. That's why the Shuttle's cargo bay was exactly the size to hold a spy satellite (which not coincidentally is about the same size as Hubble - in fact they're just a HST pointed at the ground instead of at the stars). As long as the cost of each Shuttle mission was less than the cost of building and launching a new spy satellite, it was worth it to the USAF. The USAF was hoping for one Shuttle launch every week to restock its spy satellites with fresh film. At that frequency, the rocket stages you throw away become prohibitively expensive. So the Shuttle was designed with as many re-usable parts as possible.
Unfortunately for the Shuttle, during its development, spy satellites began switching to electronic camera sensors. These could simply beam the resulting images down to Earth via radio, obviating the need for film. Consequently, by the time the Shuttle finally flew, the USAF no longer needed it for its original purpose. And the Shuttle never flew more than about a dozen times a year, with average interval between flights being more than 2 months. The huge development, facility, and staff maintenance costs which were supposed to be amortized by spreading it over 50 launches a year, were instead spread over just 5 launches a year. Resulting in a per-flight cost which far exceeded the cost of conventional rockets.
This has happened before. The USAF is bound by government purchasing requirements to provide a set of requirements, and only consider bids which meet those requirements. A bidder who exceeds those requirements does not get "extra credit" for being better. So in all likelihood Falcon Heavy was actually penalized for being bigger than "necessary".
That's what happened with the USAF bid for a tanker to replace the ancient KC-135 (based on the Boeing 707). Boeing and Airbus submitted bids, and Airbus initially won. Boeing cried foul, pointing out that the statement announcing the winner specifically mentioned the Airbus plane exceeding the capacity and range requirements the USAF originally laid out. That if the contract was going to be awarded based on exceeding the requirements, they would've offered a tanker based on their newer 777 rather than older 767. The GAO reviewed the entire thing, and decided that Boeing was right - government contracts are required by law to be awarded based on meeting the original requested specifications, not on exceeding them. If the USAF wanted a plane with better capacity and range than they originally specified, they should've specified that higher capacity and range as a requirement to begin with. The GAO told the USAF to redo the entire bid, and Boeing ended up winning the re-bid (Airbus declined to bid again).
Study suffers from a common mistake - failing to account for opportunity cost. It incorrectly compares the environmental impact of livestock versus no livestock.
A proper comparison takes into account opportunity cost - the next most likely alternative. In this case, if we reduced meat consumption, we wouldn't be raising huge amounts of cattle. But neither would we be hunting large grazing herbivores to extinction for meat. Meaning the reduction in cattle would be offset by an increase in buffalo, wild oxen, yak, deer (elk, moose), wild goats, etc. And aside from agricultural runoff and antibiotics, the net environmental impact of the change would be zero.
It also fails to realize that almost all population growth is in developing countries, whereas most meat consumption is in developed countries. In fact several developed nations are experiencing population declines. You cannot take characteristics of the population with nearly zero population growth (rate of meat consumption), and apply it to the totally different population experiencing large population growth. The countries with large population growth are mostly poor nations where people live off subsistence diets consisting of grains and starches. In fact if one were to apply the study's flawed reasoning here, one would conclude that eating meat correlates with reduced population growth. And therefore to prevent the problems caused by a growing population, we need to get more people to eat meat.
A few years ago, farmed salmon was about $5/lb, while wild-caught salmon was around $10/lb. Last year, the price of farmed salmon started rising precipitously. By the end of the year it was all the way up to $9/lb. I did a little research into why, and it's because of disease and parasite problems they're having in salmon farms killing off a lot of their fish.
The difference is a catfish or trout farm is entirely landlocked. They dig a bunch of trenches on land, fill them with water, and raise the fish in there. The waste products and any disease or parasitical infections are contained within the singular trench.
Salmon farms OTOH are mostly just nets in open water, typically at the mouths of fjords and rivers. The waste products (which include antibiotics) and any disease or parasitical infections are free to spread into the water and to other fish, including wild salmon going down the river to reach the ocean. Basically, salmon farms have externalized some of the clean-up costs associated with landlocked fish farming, by having their farms open to the water to wash the waste products out to sea. To the detriment of wild fish which happen to pass nearby.
Salmon is a fish I definitely recommend you buy wild-caught (preferably hook-and-line) rather than farmed. Especially now that the price of wild-caught is just a little bit more than farmed. Most wild salmon come from Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, which are both extremely well regulated. Or buy farmed rainbow trout/steelhead instead. It's the same thing. Rainbow trout were originally classified as trout based on geography. But in the 1980s DNA tests showed they were more closely related to the Pacific salmons. They were subsequently moved from the genus Salmo (which includes trout and Atlantic Salmon) to Oncorhynchus (the Pacific Salmons). So for North Americans, rainbow trout (a steelhead is an ocean-going rainbow trout) is more of a salmon than farmed Atlantic salmon, they just retain the trout name for historical reasons. And the orange/pink color of farmed salmon is artificial anyway. Wild salmon get the orange/pink color from the shrimp they eat, same as flamingos. Farmed salmon have the chemical added to their feed. It doesn't affect the flavor, so grey farmed trout is the same thing.
What you need to understand is that Intel's CPU business (and thus the bulk of their profit margin) is extremely fragile. The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5 - similar size ARM processors with similar transistor counts typically cost about $10-$20. So when Intel sells a CPU for $300+, over 95% of that is profit. Admittedly a lot of it is used to recoup their enormous R&D costs (typically over 20% of revenue). But the fact remains that if their CPU sales start dropping, the business model they've been using for 30+ years (overpriced CPUs to generate enormous revenue which they sink into R&D to develop leading CPUs so they can sell them overpriced) stops working.
So they will do anything to protect their CPU sales. Not saying this justifies some of their shenanigans, just explaining why the motivation for them to do illegal/immoral things is so high.
You don't need a lot of RAM to provide lots of functionality. You only need a lot to allow for lazy/sloppy programming. We've just moved towards the lazy/sloppy end because transistor fab technology has drive then price of RAM into the dirt, meaning it's cheaper just to put 4-16 GB into every modern computer than it is to pay programmers more to write small and concise code.
As Banksy is alive and active, he's still in control of the valuation of his works. If he's upset that his art is being sold for millions of dollars, all he has to do is crank out a metric ton more art. The widespread availability of his art will then cause the value of each individual work to drop, essentially shredding the investment art collectors have put into his works, without physically damaging his art.
As someone who's run small businesses for 15 years, I can assure that there's a huge difference between a productive employee, and an employee who does just enough to keep their job. We rapidly promote the former with commensurate pay raises because they help us make more money and we don't want to lose them to another company (or our competitors). Meanwhile, some of the latter have been languishing at near-minimum wage for nearly two decades, kept around mainly because their experience means it's slightly easier to suffer their mediocre work than to hire and train a new employee.
The thing most people don't understand is that for the vast majority of employees, there is no distinction between company/management and employees. The employees are the company. And the company lives or dies based on the quality of its employees. The Fortune 500 companies only employ about 17.5% of the workforce. You're making gross policy errors if you're using the behavior of large corporations to justify regulations which will affect the 82.5% of employees working at small and medium businesses. e.g. All those people calling for higher corporate tax rates due to companies hiding profit in overseas tax shelters? Small and medium businesses don't have overseas branches and so can't shelter their profit overseas. You increase the corporate tax rate, you just make it easier for the mega-corporations to kill off small local businesses.
If safety were the foremost concern, they wouldn't suddenly go from a 50 MPH to 35 MPH speed limit with no warning. They'd do it like my city does - a warning sign with flashing lights that there's a 35 MPH zone coming up about a half mile before the speed limit change, then the 35 MPH speed limit. (I think they did it this way because it's on a downhill grade, so people tended not to slow down quickly enough.)
What's needed is to eliminate money from the equation. Speeding tickets and other fines, as crimes against society, should go into an escrow fund, not into the local government's general fund. Each year in April, all money in the escrow fund should be divided up evenly and given as a tax credit to all citizens filing tax returns. Speeders get punished. All of society gets compensated for whatever damage the speeders did. And governments create their laws and allocate police enforcement on the basis of safety and keeping society functioning well rather than on the basis of maximizing revenue.
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U.S. income distribution is actually pretty good. Certainly not at European levels, but it's a myth that the 1% control U.S. income. Income stats are readily available from the iRS. The top 1% (about $500k/yr and above) only account for about 19% of total income. The top 5% (about $200k/yr and above) account for about 35% of total income. The problem is the top 25% (about $75k/yr and above) account for 70% of income. And the top 50% (about $38k/yr and above) account for 90% of income.
That is, the bottom 50% only make 10% of the income. So the problem is not limited to the 1%. Even if you confiscated all of the top 1%'s income and distributed it to the bottom 50%, that would only improve their share of income from 10% to 29%. If you make more than about $38k/yr, and especially if you make more than $75k/yr, you are part of the problem.
You're also incorrect in assuming that increased equality always equals more productivity. Aside from city-states and countries with disproportionate oil imports or banking industries, the U.S. leads the world in GDP per capita. That is, there isn't a linear correlation between income inequality and productivity. Extremely high income inequality like in nations with high corruption (Central America, Taiwan, South Korea, and China) reduces GDP per capita (productivity per citizen). But extremely low income inequality like in EU nations also reduces productivity per citizen. The U.S. sits at pretty much near the productivity optimum - the amount of income inequality it has is just about what you need if you wish to maximize productivity per citizen.
I liken it to the checkout lane problem. What's the quickest way to get shoppers checked out of a supermarket? Fast lanes (where a few elite shoppers get their own dedicated lanes with no waiting) obviously slow things down. But if you try to make everything equal (everyone stands in one line, and the person in front goes to the next available checkout lane, so it's impossible for someone who's waited less time to check out before you), that actually ends up being slower than if everyone just picks whichever lane they want. In the pick-your-own-lane model, inequality is higher (you sometimes get stuck in a slow lane so other people who've waited less than you get checked out before you). But on average the extra time added on due to the inequality is less than the time added due to the inefficiency of trying to make everything equal (in the one-line model, each checkout lane sits idle slightly longer while it waits for the next person to move from the one line to the register). Satisfaction is higher because people like fairness and equality, but the higher equality actually results in lower productivity.
So one can argue that income equality is a more desirable goal from a moral standpoint. But economically it is not optimal - a certain level of inequality is needed to maximize productivity per capita. We can still do it, like how we do not discriminate against physically disabled persons holding jobs (non-disabled people subsidize the cost of equipment to allow disabled persons to do those jobs). But understand that it results in lower productivity per capita, not higher.
About 15 years ago, I set up a private email server for our company. I'd been running a private email server for personal use since the 1990s so didn't think it would be that different. Was I ever wrong.
I was called numerous times after I'd gone home from work by employees working a later shift saying email wasn't working. For my personal email I'd just go to sleep and fix it the next morning But these people needed email to do their work, so I had to come back in and fix it ASAP. Then there were the numerous mail servers I had to petition to remove our server from their spam blacklists every month. Other people on our ISP sometimes had their computers compromised and used to send spam, and these servers were blocking the entire IP address range of our ISP. For my personal email, I would never need to send email to a lot of these servers so being blacklisted by them was inconsequential. But multiply it by all the mail servers 50 employees send email to, and suddenly you need to resolve all these blocks.
After a few months of this I threw in the towel, and signed us up for an outside email hosting service. They're staffed 24/7, so when email goes down someone there gets it fixed, usually within a few minutes. And clearing up spam blacklists is their problem - we just have to report the block. If your company is big enough to have IT staff on duty or on call 24/7 then I can see a private email server working out. But if your company is that big you're not going to run your email server on a $500 appliance.
By EV advocates.
A proper assessment of the emissions of a vehicle takes into account everything - including vehicle manufacturing, and production of the electricity used. But most EV advocates seem to draw an imaginary bubble around just their EV, and ignore everything that happens outside that bubble to support their EV, wrongly claiming that their EV is "zero emissions."
EVs are not zero emissions. All they do is shift the emissions from the tailpipe of a car to the smokestack of a power plant. I've been saying over and over that switching to an EV doesn't drastically change the carbon emissions from operating a vehicle. If you charge an EV with electricity generated by fossil fuels, its overall energy efficiency is pretty much the same as a gasoline ICE vehicle. Diesel ICEs are more energy efficient (more particulates, but less CO2).
For EVs to make an impact on CO2 emissions, it is imperative that we switch our power generation from coal/gas over to nuclear and renewables. Powering EVs with electricity generated from fossil fuels primarily reduces particulate pollution, and has little impact on CO2 emissions.
The 60 GHz band was opened up because it's easily absorbed by O2 oxygen molecules. That means it has high attenuation in the air, and thus low range, making it rather useless for traditional long-range radio transmission. But it's perfect for an open radio frequency, where the attenuation means your neighbor's 60 GHz transmissions are less likely to interfere with yours.
2.4 GHz was opened for the same reason (absorbed by water - how microwave ovens at 2.45 GHz work). I haven't been able to track down why 5 GHz was opened, but the fact that it's also used for doppler weather radar suggests attenuation by water as well.
Basically, any frequency which will penetrate well and thus have good range would become useless if opened up, due to interference from devices used by other people nearby. The cellular frequencies are an exception, since it's up to the cellular companies to actively manage bandwidth allocation (i.e. prevent interference) on the frequencies they leased.
If your ship is crewed by on-site staff, they may work an 8 hour shift, but they're basically on-call the other 16 hours. They're paid a slight premium for this, say 50%. So you're essentially getting the work of 3 employees for the cost of 1.5 since the crew is there mostly to take care of emergencies, not actually doing stuff all the time.
If your ship is "crewed" remotely by staff which go home every night, you'll need three 8-hour shifts. Increasing personnel costs by 2x.
Any labor savings is going to come from automation (i.e. eliminating human jobs) and improving reliability. Not by moving the crew off the ship. The engineer (mechanic) is along for the ride "just in case" the engines break during the voyage. If you can get engine reliability high enough, it may be an acceptable risk to forego the engineer. i.e. The rate at which you lose ships due to mechanical breakdown costs less than the payroll of having an engineer aboard every ship. You can't eliminate him in a crewed ship because the other crew will die if the ship is lost due to a breakdown. But if the ship is uncrewed, then your only losses from a breakdown are financial.
Heating and cooking are trivial. The ship has got huge diesel engines running 24/7 generating copious amounts of waste heat. Diesel engines on this scale are about 50% efficient. Half the energy in the fuel goes into propelling the ship. The other half becomes waste heat. The problem is getting rid of heat, not generating it (if the cooling system breaks down, the ship is dead in the water until it's fixed). Likewise, the amount of drinking water needed by a crew (about 2-4 kg per day per person) is inconsequential to the cargo capacity of the ship. Heck, if you needed you could add a bleed valve to a pressurized raw water coolant line, and venting it would cause the superheated water to flash boil, which if run through a rudimentary still would produce pure drinkable water when condensed.
The accident reduction part I could agree with, though I wonder if without having lives on the line, people might engage in riskier behavior which leads to more accidents, not fewer. I'll note that the Exxon Valdez accident happened because the company didn't want to pay to fix the radar. That kind of skimping is more likely to happen if people's lives aren't on the line, not less.
If the state requires you to use a government-issued ID to confirm your identity for voting, you can generally vote at any one of multiple polling stations. Your ID is used to confirm you only voted once.
If the state prohibits identity verification by ID, you have to go to your one designated polling station. You tell the poll workers your name and address. They have a big printed list of everyone who's supposed to vote at that polling station, and look you up to confirm that you're on it, cross off your name, and give you your ballot. The fact that your name has been crossed off the list is used to confirm that you only voted once.
Add the screwed up roll-out. Google+ Circles were the perfect solution to companies wanting to use a social media platform in-house. You could create an arbitrary number of circles and organize people (employees for a company) into whichever and multiple circles (departments, focus groups, whatever). This was the platform's killer feature that Facebook didn't have.
Except it took them more than a year to roll out Google+ to companies using Google Apps for Business (their name for using Gmail and other Google apps like Maps, Calendar, Sheets, Docs, etc. under your company's own domain name). The one place where the real-name policy wouldn't have been a negative, and they gave it lowest priority.
The main reason to use the full-blown version of Photoshop over other cheap/free photo editing tools is its handling of layers and selections. Seems like it would be painful and time-consuming to use those functions on a touch device. They make extensive use of modifiers like ctrl, shift, and alt/command to rapidly make click and click-drag do different things, avoiding constantly having to change menu options.
I've no doubt the iPad's hardware can handle it (my phone is about 50x faster and has more than a hundred times more RAM than the first computer I used Photoshop on). But simpler is not always better.
Same reason mustard gas wasn't used extensively in WWI - a shift in the wind could blow the gas over your own troops. The rationale of a terrorist is to inflict death and destruction among a target population. If a bioengineeered smallpox virus attack were successful and started an epidemic in a target country, it's almost certain to travel around the world and eventually arrive back at the terrorists' home country. As fatality rates would be higher in countries with poor medical care, and most terrorist organizations are based in developing countries, they would end up harming themselves more than their target.
The only people I could see trying to do this are anarchists, and reckless researchers or home biologists.
Defense spending has dropped significantly as percent of the budget since the 1960s. The bulk of the budget is now Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlements. We already spend $2.6 trillion dollars per year on the types of programs you're advocating. Adding $18 billion would hardly make a difference. At this point you're advocating removing sand from a molehill to try to make a mountain bigger.
Point out one country which doesn't spend money on a military. There isn't, because everyone country which tried it was invaded and conquered by another country. Like it or not, the world is not unicorns and rainbows. The bottom line is that it's nearly always cheaper to forcibly take resources away from a neighbor than it is to cultivate/harvest/mine/develop them yourself. So there will always be an incentive for countries to invade and conquer other countries.
Having a military to defend yourself with is the most economically sound way to dissuade a potential invader. You have $200 billion in assets, but no defense. An invader figures they can spend $5 billion to invade you and take away your $200 billion, for a net profit (to them) of $195 billion.
But if you spend $5 billion of your assets on a military which can inflict $200 billion in damage, that changes the math. Now the invader estimates it will lose $205 billion from invading you, for a net loss of $5 billion. So they leave you alone. Yes you had to spend $5 billion, but it resulted in you not losing $200 billion.
This is an unfortunate oversight in a lot of people's thinking. They assume the status quo would continue to exist even if they eliminated one factor, ignoring how that factor contributes to the status quo. Like people who think because the air is clean, we don't need clean air regulations. The country being free from invasion is not its natural state. If you eliminate military spending and the "murder weapons" as you put it, someone else would simply waltz in and take away everything you own, probably murdering several or most of your family in the process. I know because it's what happened to my country (Korea).
U.S. military spending is huge only because the U.S. economy is huge. As percent of GDP, the U.S. doesn't even make the top 25. It only spends about 3.5% of its GDP on military spending, slightly above the world average of about 2.3%. If you factor in that the U.S. is bound by the peace treaties ending WWII to provide for Japan's national defense, U.S. military spending drops to 2.8% of the combined Japan + U.S. GDP. Add in NATO (which allows European countries to underspend on their militaries - the U.S. really should've withdrawn from it at the end of the Cold War) and it's pretty much right at the world average.
Complaining that U.S. military spending is huge on the basis of its raw dollar amount is like complaining that a city of 10 million consumes 10x as much food as a city of 1 million.
H2 sits at a high energy state (elemental forms are defined as zero, most other molecules have negative Gibbs free energy, indicating a lower energy state). Generating molecules with high Gibbs free energy usually requires putting energy into the system. Since the mortar reaction drives itself (the mortar sets), more likely it forms H2O, which sits at a very low energy state (which is why water is the end product of a lot of combustion reactions).
CO2 is also a very low energy state (why it's also the end product of combustion of respiration), so converting it into nearly anything else requires putting energy in to drive the reaction up the energy gradient. Plants convert CO2 (and H2O) into glucose by using energy from sunlight (photosynthesis) to drive the reaction. Presumably this material does the same.
Also, the idea isn't completely new. Self-healing fiber reinforced polymers (like fiberglass or carbon fiber) have been made by encapsulating small amounts of the two components of epoxy (resin and hardener) separately inside the FRP. When the FRP develops a crack, some of these capsules are also broken open. The liquid resin and hardener ooze out, mix, and harden into epoxy to seal the crack. The material in TFA is a bit different in that it pulls the required materials out of the air.
We already have the tools today for artists not to sell their soul to record companies. Anyone can set up their own website, upload their own music to YouTube, sell albums on iTunes and the Amazon and Google equivalents. The MMA doesn't change that. It's just a matter of wannabe rock stars taking the risk of doing it on their own, instead of wanting to be handheld through the music production process by a studio who will in return rob them blind.
If you want to erect an ironclad separation between corporations and politics, then there's one further step you need to take. Do you believe in "no taxation without representation?" Most Americans do. If you do, and you also believe in taxing corporations, then you also believe corporations are entitled to representation in government. Since corporations can't vote, the only form of representation they have is (drumroll)... campaign contributions.
So to completely separate corporations and politics requires (1) not voting for anyone who accepts campaign contributions from a corporation, and (2) eliminating corporate taxes.
If you're gonna argue that corporations are made up of people, who can vote, then congratulations - you've half figured it out. Yes corporations are made up of people. And corporate taxes are paid for by those same people - via higher prices, lower wages, and lower dividends. So it doesn't really matter whether you tax corporations, or instead tax the people buying corporate products, working at corporations, and receiving dividends from corporate stock. The same people end up paying the taxes either way. Corporations are just pass-through paper entities, a facade for the people behind them - both in terms of representation and for taxation. The cleanest way to accomplish what you want still remains eliminating corporate taxes and removing the ability of corporations to donate to campaigns.
Amazon can agree to pay Wikipedia when Wikipedia agrees to pay the volunteers who maintain and update its info.
The volunteers agreed to provide that service without compensation.
Wikipedia agreed to provide its service without compensation. If it now wants to switch to a pay model (and that's what this is - wanting to be paid for the service it's providing), it's free to do so (provided it can figure out a way to placate the volunteers who gave freely of their time and labor to make Wikipedia possible). Hint: Encyclopedia Britannica already tried the pay model.
The Space Shuttle was originally proposed in the 1960s, and designed in the 1970s. Back then, spy satellites used film. After a full roll was shot, it was ejected, re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, and an elaborate system was in place to capture those film canisters in mid-air. When all the film aboard a spy satellite was used, it became a billion dollar paperweight in orbit.
The point of the Space Shuttle was to go into orbit, dock with a spy satellite, and re-load it with new film canisters. That's why the Shuttle's cargo bay was exactly the size to hold a spy satellite (which not coincidentally is about the same size as Hubble - in fact they're just a HST pointed at the ground instead of at the stars). As long as the cost of each Shuttle mission was less than the cost of building and launching a new spy satellite, it was worth it to the USAF. The USAF was hoping for one Shuttle launch every week to restock its spy satellites with fresh film. At that frequency, the rocket stages you throw away become prohibitively expensive. So the Shuttle was designed with as many re-usable parts as possible.
Unfortunately for the Shuttle, during its development, spy satellites began switching to electronic camera sensors. These could simply beam the resulting images down to Earth via radio, obviating the need for film. Consequently, by the time the Shuttle finally flew, the USAF no longer needed it for its original purpose. And the Shuttle never flew more than about a dozen times a year, with average interval between flights being more than 2 months. The huge development, facility, and staff maintenance costs which were supposed to be amortized by spreading it over 50 launches a year, were instead spread over just 5 launches a year. Resulting in a per-flight cost which far exceeded the cost of conventional rockets.
This has happened before. The USAF is bound by government purchasing requirements to provide a set of requirements, and only consider bids which meet those requirements. A bidder who exceeds those requirements does not get "extra credit" for being better. So in all likelihood Falcon Heavy was actually penalized for being bigger than "necessary".
That's what happened with the USAF bid for a tanker to replace the ancient KC-135 (based on the Boeing 707). Boeing and Airbus submitted bids, and Airbus initially won. Boeing cried foul, pointing out that the statement announcing the winner specifically mentioned the Airbus plane exceeding the capacity and range requirements the USAF originally laid out. That if the contract was going to be awarded based on exceeding the requirements, they would've offered a tanker based on their newer 777 rather than older 767. The GAO reviewed the entire thing, and decided that Boeing was right - government contracts are required by law to be awarded based on meeting the original requested specifications, not on exceeding them. If the USAF wanted a plane with better capacity and range than they originally specified, they should've specified that higher capacity and range as a requirement to begin with. The GAO told the USAF to redo the entire bid, and Boeing ended up winning the re-bid (Airbus declined to bid again).
Study suffers from a common mistake - failing to account for opportunity cost. It incorrectly compares the environmental impact of livestock versus no livestock.
A proper comparison takes into account opportunity cost - the next most likely alternative. In this case, if we reduced meat consumption, we wouldn't be raising huge amounts of cattle. But neither would we be hunting large grazing herbivores to extinction for meat. Meaning the reduction in cattle would be offset by an increase in buffalo, wild oxen, yak, deer (elk, moose), wild goats, etc. And aside from agricultural runoff and antibiotics, the net environmental impact of the change would be zero.
It also fails to realize that almost all population growth is in developing countries, whereas most meat consumption is in developed countries. In fact several developed nations are experiencing population declines . You cannot take characteristics of the population with nearly zero population growth (rate of meat consumption), and apply it to the totally different population experiencing large population growth. The countries with large population growth are mostly poor nations where people live off subsistence diets consisting of grains and starches. In fact if one were to apply the study's flawed reasoning here, one would conclude that eating meat correlates with reduced population growth. And therefore to prevent the problems caused by a growing population, we need to get more people to eat meat.
A few years ago, farmed salmon was about $5/lb, while wild-caught salmon was around $10/lb. Last year, the price of farmed salmon started rising precipitously. By the end of the year it was all the way up to $9/lb. I did a little research into why, and it's because of disease and parasite problems they're having in salmon farms killing off a lot of their fish.
The difference is a catfish or trout farm is entirely landlocked. They dig a bunch of trenches on land, fill them with water, and raise the fish in there. The waste products and any disease or parasitical infections are contained within the singular trench.
Salmon farms OTOH are mostly just nets in open water, typically at the mouths of fjords and rivers. The waste products (which include antibiotics) and any disease or parasitical infections are free to spread into the water and to other fish, including wild salmon going down the river to reach the ocean. Basically, salmon farms have externalized some of the clean-up costs associated with landlocked fish farming, by having their farms open to the water to wash the waste products out to sea. To the detriment of wild fish which happen to pass nearby.
Salmon is a fish I definitely recommend you buy wild-caught (preferably hook-and-line) rather than farmed. Especially now that the price of wild-caught is just a little bit more than farmed. Most wild salmon come from Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, which are both extremely well regulated. Or buy farmed rainbow trout/steelhead instead. It's the same thing. Rainbow trout were originally classified as trout based on geography. But in the 1980s DNA tests showed they were more closely related to the Pacific salmons. They were subsequently moved from the genus Salmo (which includes trout and Atlantic Salmon) to Oncorhynchus (the Pacific Salmons). So for North Americans, rainbow trout (a steelhead is an ocean-going rainbow trout) is more of a salmon than farmed Atlantic salmon, they just retain the trout name for historical reasons. And the orange/pink color of farmed salmon is artificial anyway. Wild salmon get the orange/pink color from the shrimp they eat, same as flamingos. Farmed salmon have the chemical added to their feed. It doesn't affect the flavor, so grey farmed trout is the same thing.
What you need to understand is that Intel's CPU business (and thus the bulk of their profit margin) is extremely fragile. The silicon needed for a typical CPU only costs about $5 - similar size ARM processors with similar transistor counts typically cost about $10-$20. So when Intel sells a CPU for $300+, over 95% of that is profit. Admittedly a lot of it is used to recoup their enormous R&D costs (typically over 20% of revenue). But the fact remains that if their CPU sales start dropping, the business model they've been using for 30+ years (overpriced CPUs to generate enormous revenue which they sink into R&D to develop leading CPUs so they can sell them overpriced) stops working.
So they will do anything to protect their CPU sales. Not saying this justifies some of their shenanigans, just explaining why the motivation for them to do illegal/immoral things is so high.
Voyagers 1 and 2 had less than 70 kB of RAM. Data was stored on tape drives.
You don't need a lot of RAM to provide lots of functionality. You only need a lot to allow for lazy/sloppy programming. We've just moved towards the lazy/sloppy end because transistor fab technology has drive then price of RAM into the dirt, meaning it's cheaper just to put 4-16 GB into every modern computer than it is to pay programmers more to write small and concise code.
As Banksy is alive and active, he's still in control of the valuation of his works. If he's upset that his art is being sold for millions of dollars, all he has to do is crank out a metric ton more art. The widespread availability of his art will then cause the value of each individual work to drop, essentially shredding the investment art collectors have put into his works, without physically damaging his art.
As someone who's run small businesses for 15 years, I can assure that there's a huge difference between a productive employee, and an employee who does just enough to keep their job. We rapidly promote the former with commensurate pay raises because they help us make more money and we don't want to lose them to another company (or our competitors). Meanwhile, some of the latter have been languishing at near-minimum wage for nearly two decades, kept around mainly because their experience means it's slightly easier to suffer their mediocre work than to hire and train a new employee.
The thing most people don't understand is that for the vast majority of employees, there is no distinction between company/management and employees. The employees are the company. And the company lives or dies based on the quality of its employees. The Fortune 500 companies only employ about 17.5% of the workforce. You're making gross policy errors if you're using the behavior of large corporations to justify regulations which will affect the 82.5% of employees working at small and medium businesses. e.g. All those people calling for higher corporate tax rates due to companies hiding profit in overseas tax shelters? Small and medium businesses don't have overseas branches and so can't shelter their profit overseas. You increase the corporate tax rate, you just make it easier for the mega-corporations to kill off small local businesses.
If safety were the foremost concern, they wouldn't suddenly go from a 50 MPH to 35 MPH speed limit with no warning. They'd do it like my city does - a warning sign with flashing lights that there's a 35 MPH zone coming up about a half mile before the speed limit change, then the 35 MPH speed limit. (I think they did it this way because it's on a downhill grade, so people tended not to slow down quickly enough.)
What's needed is to eliminate money from the equation. Speeding tickets and other fines, as crimes against society, should go into an escrow fund, not into the local government's general fund. Each year in April, all money in the escrow fund should be divided up evenly and given as a tax credit to all citizens filing tax returns. Speeders get punished. All of society gets compensated for whatever damage the speeders did. And governments create their laws and allocate police enforcement on the basis of safety and keeping society functioning well rather than on the basis of maximizing revenue.