Poverty level for a single person is $12,140/yr. Which at 2000 work hours/yr (40 hrs/week, 50 weeks/yr) is $6.06/hr. For a family of 4, it's $25,100/yr, which would translate into $12.55/hr.
So in both cases $15/hr would lift you and your family well out of poverty. Only in Alaska would a family of 4 with a single breadwinner making $15/hr still be in poverty.
Reducing living costs in cities is simple - allow more housing to be constructed, build better transportation to make it feasible to live further from work. Unfortunately, most cities are resistant to this, or are bound by geography which prevents expansion.
Tax revenue initially fell after Bush's tax cut, but picked up again after the tech bubble-caused recession. Same for the housing bubble - tax revenue fell during the recession, but returned to historical levels post-recession. In other words, the tax cuts didn't cause the growing deficits and debt.
It's increased spending which is causing the growing deficits. Primarily growth in Social Security, Medicare, and other health programs. Spending on other programs - even defense - has been falling. So Social Security, Medicare, and other health programs are what we need to rein in if we want to get the budget under control. Unfortunately, those are the programs Democrats consider sacrosanct and refuse to allow us to modify.
I'll also point out that the flip side of the stimulus spending under Obama to jump-start the economy, is that once the economy gets going again you reduce spending to below historical levels. Basically government spending should act as a stabilizer, 180 degrees out of phase with the economy (stimulating the economy when it's poor, slowing it down when it's good to prevent it from overheating) The government saves up during good times, so it has a piggy back it can use to spend during bad times.. I agreed that stimulus spending was the correct thing to do after the housing bubble, but opposed it because I knew the second half (reduced spending) would never happen. Leaving us further mired in debt (which went from about 60% of GDP to over 100% under Obama). Unless we get that debt reduced, the only thing saving us right now is the low interest rates. If those go up, the interest on the debt will balloon and begin to dominate the budget.
It makes it really easy to pick out the people who have no clue what they're talking about, and have based their conclusions on idealized beliefs rather than solid engineering data. I concentrate on educating listeners about the difference between power and energy, so they can pick these people out and ignore them like I do. Don't correct the shills and snake oil salesmen - let them continue to make the error.
Yeah. Relativity would've been a fringe theory to anyone who believed in classic Newtonian physics at the turn of the 20th century. Relativity was given consideration because it provided an explanation for some of the observed weirdness which Newtonian physics didn't (Michelson-Morley, orbit of Mercury). If this was just some guy advocating a theory out of the blue, then I'd be suspect of DARPA funding him. But if his theory can explain galactic rotation without using dark matter, then I think it's definitely worth investigating.
The situation in cosmology is similar to pre-Relativity right now - we're seeing something which doesn't make sense using the laws of physics we know of. Instead of making the mistake of ignoring opportunity cost and assuming the most popular theory is correct, think of it this way. We know galaxies can't rotate as we see them rotating using classical celestial mechanics and observed mass. So we've got two competing theories to explain the deviation. Dark Matter, where 85% of the mass in the known universe is stuff we've never seen nor detected and have no idea what it is - basically adding a fudge factor to make our observations fit our understanding of physics. Or this guy's quantized inertia theory. Denying him the funding simply because his theory is fringe is nothing more than blind faith in the dark matter theory being correct.
Even if he turns out to be wrong, $1.3 million is not much in the grand scheme of these things. The DoD and DARPA threw a lot more money at psychic phenomenon during the Cold War simply because the Soviets were also researching it, and they couldn't take the chance that there might actually be something to it which the Soviets might discover first Because we learn from history books which only outline what was investigated, most people wrongly assume there are only two possible outcomes here:
1. A theory was correct and was investigated.
2. A theory was incorrect, and we wasted money investigating it.
There are actually four possible outcomes here:
1. A theory was correct and was investigated.
2. A theory was incorrect, but was investigated.
3. A theory was correct, but was not investigated.
4. A theory was incorrect, and was not investigated.
Like throwing darts, the vast majority of research will fall into the second outcome - investigated and turns out to be wrong. The few shining gems of science (first outcome) are the wheat sifted out of all the chaff via this process. In addition, outcomes two and three and inextricably linked - the less you have of the second, the more you'll get of the third, and vice versa. So decreasing funding for theories which will probably turn out to be incorrect, will increase the number of correct theories we never learn because they were never investigated (throwing the baby out with the bathwater). And trying prevent missing correct theories because we never investigated them, will inevitably lead to more incorrect theories being investigated (casting a wider net will result in catching more trash fish).
I think game streaming is the future (aside from competitive gaming where absolute minimal latency is required).
If you buy your own GPU, you're spending say $360 every 2 years to stay relatively state-of-the-art. That works out to $15/mo.
If you're paying to stream games, your monthly payment is being pooled with all other streamers to buy state-of-the-art GPUs. It's this pooling which creates the economic efficiency. If at a maximum only 1/3 of subscribers will play games at any one time, then essentially what you're doing is equivalent to 3 people pooling their money to buy a $360 GPU every 2 years. That GPU gets passed around between them so they can use it to play games one at a time. Their individual cost then is just $5/mo (vs $15/mo for buying your own GPU) for almost the exact same gaming experience.
The improved economic efficiency is just too massive for buying individual GPUs to continue to make sense for most people. It's actually pretty similar to how Amazon has made a massively successful cloud computing business (AWS). Or how everyone uses Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo mail instead of setting up their own personal mail server.
That said, as you point out the client is pretty immaterial. The way these game streaming services (including Steam In-Home Streaming) work is by converting the game display into a h.264 video stream in real time. To the client, there's very little difference between a streamed game and a streamed movie. And pretty much everything (including low-end cell phones) come with a h.264 hardware decoder nowadays specifically to let you stream movies. So just about anything could be used as the client for streaming games.
More broadly, this is why technology barely advanced for thousands of years. Paranoid craftsmen discovering new techniques but keeping them secret, whispering them to their children while on their deathbed. Except like this guy, a lot of them never managed to pass on the secret, causing it to be lost, only to be discovered again later, to be lost yet again, etc. (We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made his violins.) It's not a coincidence that the pace of technological advancement began to pick up around the same time as the printing press - when ideas could be made semi-permanent by publishing, thereby entering them into the shared knowledgebase of the human race.
The Spanish Flu caused a cytokine storm. Basically caused your immune system to overreact, and kill yourself. Consequently, people with strong immune systems - fit and healthy young adults - were the most likely to die from it. Contrast this to modern examples of the flu which mostly picks off children and the elderly.
If the population today is generally healthier than in 1918, something like the Spanish Flu would be even more deadly today than it was then. (Though to be fair, we don't have a World War going on forcing people into tight quarters and to move around the world, spreading the virus.)
The tax shouldn't be for violating right to repair. That's too subjective - some people don't believe in right to repair..
The tax should be for artificially shortening the usable lifespan of the device, causing it to prematurely enter the waste stream. That's objective, indisputable, and quantifiable. If the device (with repairs) is designed to stay in service for 10+ years, then no tax. 7-9 years, 25% tax. 5-6 years, 50%. 3-4 years 100%. 1-2 years 200%. This would also handle the problem of proprietary parts no longer being available for older devices. If a manufacturer wants to use proprietary parts, they have to keep replacement parts in stock for 15+ years to avoid the tax (retroactive if they fail). The alternative is to use non-proprietary parts so replacements can be bought on the open market, freeing the manufacturer from having to keep them in stock themselves.
For brownie points, you could require warranties to extend this long. You have to be careful with that though, since it could shift the economics to where the tax becomes cheaper than the cost of providing warranty service for a decade, causing companies to favor intentionally shortening the lifespan of the device.
"Right to do whatever the hell you want with the stuff you own."
I've said before that if companies want to control how you use the devices they sell you (e.g. printers which reject 3rd party ink cartridges, iPhones which brick themselves if you use a 3rd party replacement screen, etc), then you don't own the device. You're leasing it from the manufacturer. And like when something breaks in the apartment you're leasing, any repair costs need to be paid by the manufacturer, not the lessee. The current scheme being perpetrated by these companies is shifting the cost of ownership onto the buyer, while not giving them full rights of ownership. It's perverse.
That's cost per kW of capacity. Nuclear typically has a capacity factor of 90% - over a year it will produce about 90% of its max capacity. Gas and coal have capacity factors closer to 50%. (gas is typically used for peaking load, since it can scale up and down quickly; it's not run full throttle 24/7). So the $1800 per kW of capacity for gas is closer to $3600 per kW of actual production. Meaning NuScale's $4200/kW is pretty damn close.
It's the same reason why wind and solar appear to do so well by this metric. Onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 22%, solar about 15%. So if you normalize the metric to kW of production (rather than capacity), you end up with wind at about $7500/kW, and PV solar at about $12,300/kW. (PV solar with tracking can approach 30%, which would put it at about $7000/kW.)
This isn't about picking Intel over Qualcomm. The allegation (which I'm not qualified to judge if it has merit) is that Apple doesn't like paying higher prices to the one player dominating the market, so is trying to help give a competitor a leg up. The long-term plan being if Intel's chipset improves enough to become a viable alternative to Qualcomm's, the two will compete with each other and lower their prices. Basically like if some company were to sell hardware which could install MacOS on instead of having to buy a Mac. (MacOS will actually run on most PC hardware - the Macs are just PCs running a different OS. It's only Apple's software license which prohibits MacOS from being sold or installed onto generic PC hardware.)
That's what gives the allegation a veneer of credibility. Apple has done exactly this (albeit legally) with Samsung - going with slower Toshiba NAND and SK Hynix RAM in their devices instead of Samsung. Trying to have LG manufacture the OLED panels for their iPhones as an alternative to Samsung. Apple's MO among suppliers is like Walmart - use its market dominance to bully suppliers into accepting extremely thin margins ("Well if you won't sign this hundred million dollar contract with us at a lower unit price, then we'll just ink a deal with your competitor instead."). That's partly how they maintain such a huge profit margin (over 20%, vs about 5% for the rest of the computer industry), not just by overcharging customers. But it's a tactic which doesn't work when only one supplier dominates the market.
Apple will also move away from x86 towards their own desktop/laptop ARM processors.
x86 is CISC. ARM is RISC. CISC vs RISC has played out numerous times since the 1980s. CISC has won every time. I like the idea behind RISC, but its advantages don't seem to beat out the advantages of CISC when it comes to optimized processor performance. RISC seems to have an advantage when rapidly transitioning to new processing regimes (previously high-end data processing with MIPS, currently with low-power processing with ARM). But it's like once the transition has been made or slows down, CISC allows you to optimize it further, resulting in CISC beating out RISC long-term.
Microsoft doesn't care what users think. Anyone who is surprised at this is just being silly. Microsoft has shown no desire to actually cater to users.
You are not the customer. You are the product. Your usage info and access to your computer (to force-install programs) is being sold to the actual customers - companies wanting marketing info and to sell you things.
The difference is Facebook and Google have to give their product away for free to get people to agree to be the product. Microsoft somehow still manages to get people to pay for the "privilege" of becoming the product.
The best products succeed because they are practical, not because they are trendy. That's why Google (which ranked search results based on number of referring links) won out over Altavista (which just used frequency of occurrence) and Yahoo (which used human-picked or -created links). If smartwatches are going to be a thing, then they will succeed with both old and new generation alike. (Which isn't to say someone can't make a fortune marketing them as a fashion trend.)
Driver's license and Social Security number are the most commonly used documents for the I-9 form. Basically, the government doesn't want you hiring aliens and visitors without a work visa, but don't have a system in place for an employer to verify if someone is authorized to work in the country (is a citizen or has a work visa). Rather than put together such a system, the government requires employers to collect the I-9 - it becomes the employer's proof that they did their due diligence and collected the info the government required of them to "determine" work eligibility. (In quotes because the documents are commonly forged, and the employer can't root out forgeries because they'll get in trouble if they mistake real docs for a forgery.)
The tax documents are probably the W-4 form. They're used to determine how much of your paycheck is withheld (sent directly to the IRS) for income taxes. If an employee is dishonest or wrong and the incorrect amount is withheld (usually the employee errs on the low side), it gets corrected on April 15. If the employee had too little withheld, they could face fines. So the employer has to keep the W4 on file as proof that the incorrect withholding wasn't their fault, and they did as the employee told them to do. It's a matter that is entirely between the employee and the IRS, but the IRS doesn't want to do it themselves (employee could submit the W4 to the IRS, and the IRS could tell the employer how much to withhold). So they require employers to do it and force them to keep each employee's W4 on file. This one has always baffled me - the IRS verifies it anyway when the employee files their taxes, so it's not like the IRS would have to do any extra work to handle it themselves instead of foisting the job onto employers..
Both are usually shoved in a filing cabinet and forgotten about, since the government requires you to keep them but they're never used for anything again (unless you happen to be raided by INS or ICE)..
So if some hacker steals your social security and credit card numbers and publishes it on the dark net, he's just fighting censorship because information wants to be free?
IRC was that way because of the anonymity (other services like Usenet required an email address, which back then was almost always based on your real name).. The Wild West was tamed as civilization and the rule of law rolled out. But this sort of bad behavior on the Internet will persist as long as people can interact anonymously.
I firmly believe anonymity has benefits for democracy, but it has this unfortunate drawback as well. We need to come up with ideas for how to keep those advantages while discouraging the disadvantages. The real problems are the people who think this is justification for eliminating anonymity entirely, and the absolutists who defend anonymity to the point where they won't accept any compromise.
The amount of time people are willing to spend researching a product is proportional to how much it costs. So if you're buying a $30,000 car, you're going to spend several weeks researching and trying out different cars to figure out which one you like best before buying.
OTOH, if you're looking for a game app under $10, you're probably going to grab the first one you see which sounds interesting. Prioritizing the cheap ones.
(This is not to denigrate Tesla's safety engineering. The lead safety engineer at BMW gave a guest lecture at my graduate structural engineering class. To our surprise, safety is dead last in the design process. First the artist designs the basic shape of the car. Then all the engineers design the mechanical and electrical components to fit within the artist-defined shape. Finally the safety engineer is given a budget of (say) 25 kg of steel, and told to add reinforcement to make the car pass the government and insurance institute safety tests. So all it would take to design a safer car is to move the safety engineer earlier in the design process, which I believe Tesla has done.)
Though the manufacturing companies are pandering to the lazy users. The proper way to access a device on your LAN from the Internet is to set up your router with a VPN server. When you're away from home, you connect to your home router via the VPN. That'll give you access to your NAS, your security cameras, your media library, etc. while you're away from home.
But users are too lazy to bother to set up a VPN server (even though many routers now come with one built-in) and manage a dynamic DNS domain name. So manufacturers pander to them by setting up each individual device to be accessible from the cloud. Usually by having the device contact a server via the manufacturer's website, which acts as a go-between for the handshaking between the cloud device when you try to access it from the Internet. That is, the device handles the VPN-like encryption and their server handles tracking your LAN's public IP address (equivalent to dynamic DNS).
By itself this isn't any worse than using a VPN. But multiply it by a half dozen cloud devices, and the chances that every single one of those devices is secure is substantially lower than the chance that your VPN server is secure.
So what's the difference between taxing Apple's profit, versus taxing its sales sufficiently to generate the same tax revenue? In both cases the customer will pay $x for an iPhone, and a certain percentage of that will be sent to the government as tax revenue. In the former case, Apple Inc. is the intermediary so gets to play international shell games to try to avoid taxes. In the latter case, the local Apple Store is the intermediary, and hands the tax revenue directly to the government before it can play shell games. Both taxes have the same result (same percentage of what each customer pays is sent to the government as tax revenue), one is just a helluva lot easier to track and collect than the other.
2. Stop taxing profit. Profit is very easy to manipulate and shift around. Instead, tax sales, or payroll, or dividends, or charge resource excise taxes, or infrastructure use fees, or whatever. None of those can be easily shifted between jurisdictions.
I've been advocating this for years. People need to stop thinking of taxes as a way to "stick it to x" (where x = rich person, corporation, someone you don't like). And start recognizing taxes for what they are - diverting a part of the country's productivity to the government coffers to fund government programs. Because the economy is circular (every purchase is a sale, every paycheck is an expense), the point where you do the diverting (the person/company who pays the taxes) is irrelevant. If you tax companies, it just gets passed on to the rest of the economy as lower wages, lower dividends, and higher prices. And on average, everyone pays for the corporate tax. Exactly the same as if you converted all the corporate taxes to a sales tax. Or converted all the corporate taxes to an income tax (profit for a company becomes income for someone else, which can be taxed). Or converted all taxes to a corporate tax.
Corporations are just trickier to tax than people because they can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions, which is what allows them to shift income around from country to country. People by definition can physically exist in only one place at a time, making it a lot easier to tally up their income or sales (purchases) and tax them.
The distribution of the dots don't appear to form a trend anything like the black line. Looking at the dots, it looks like premature deaths start at an average 4000 years of life lost at 1500 hours worked (6 hours/day @ 5 days/wk, 50 weeks/yr). Rises to an average 6000 years of life lost at 2000 hours worked (8 hours/day). Then drops back down to 4000 years of life lost at 2400 hours worked (9.6 hours/day). Based on the dots, it would appear 1800-2000 hours worked per year is the most dangerous (roughly 7.2-8 hours/day at 5 days/week, 50 weeks/yr). And fewer or more hours worked is healthier.
The huge range in the vertical axis (a difference of 3x to 5x in least/most years of life lost) also suggests the correlation is rather weak. And that other factors matter a lot more than hours worked.
Also, the first graph seems rather obvious. A person working will pick off the lowest-hanging fruit first - complete the tasks first which generate the most productivity for the least effort. Subsequent work is less productive not necessarily because they're tired and less productive, but because the easier tasks have already been done, leaving only the harder tasks which take more time.
Total productivity per worker is actually the product of the two axes (productivity per hour worked times number of hours worked). And that's the figure which matters here. If you're working so many hours that your total productivity actually decreases compared to working fewer hours, then that's incontrovertible proof that you're working too many hours - so many that it's hurting your productivity. That graph would form a nice curve with a peak, which is your optimal number of hours worked for maximum productivity.
The peak for the graph you've presented (productivity per hour worked) would (extending the trendline) be at 0 hours worked. Which does nothing to support the assertion that fewer hours worked is more productive, since no hours worked would result in zero productivity. But it does support my interpretation that workers prioritize tasks to complete the easier most-bang-for-the-buck tasks first.
It's also worth pointing out that most of the camera sensors used in phones are made by Sony (including the camera in the iPhone). A lot of the differences these camera review sites are trumpeting is nothing more than post-processing. That is, if you had the raw image data, you could process it to make one camera's output identical to another's. If you're a serious enough photographer to read DXO Mark's reviews, then you probably already have the post-processing knowledge to overcome most of the flaws they point out in a particular phone's camera.
Sony grabbed the opportunity that Kodak missed. While Kodak was the first company to realize that electronic digital imaging was the future (they developed first the CCD camera in 1975), they didn't have the technological base to manufacture their own sensors on the scale needed to replace film. So they always outsourced that part of their production. This resulted in Kodak holding nothing but patents when digital replaced film. OTOH Sony had the technical capability to manufacture their own sensors, and quickly took over the small camera sensor market.
Contrary to people thinking that this is somehow being orchestrated by Big Oil or existing automakers trying to slow down the switch to EVs. Tesla is not driving the adoption of EVs, it is the beneficiary. CARB is the one driving the adoption of EVs (California Air Resources Board - the government agency which sets California's air quality standards). CARB instituted a ZEV mandate (Zero Emissions Vehicle) starting a few years back (2014 I think?). Each year, a certain percentage of each automakers' unit sales has to be ZEVs. The formula is a bit complex (there's also a requirement for hybrid sales), but for 2018 the target is about 2.5% ZEVs. It ramps up each year - by 2025 the target will be about 8%. Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle which qualifies as ZEV, but thus far every other ZEV has been an EV.
If an automaker fails to meet the requisite percentage, it must buy ZEV credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail to buy enough credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker from being banned from selling to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market, so they're all busy rolling out EVs to comply with CARB. If they haven't sold enough EVs toward the end of the year, they will run sales and incentives to get enough EVs pushed off their lots (which is why California gets the best EV sales - only EVs sold in California count towards the mandate). And failing that, they will buy ZEV credits, usually from Tesla. So the push to sell EVs has nothing to do with Tesla. Tesla could disappear and we'd see the exact same number of EV sold each year - because the percentage is set by CARB, not the market.
Way back before the ZEV mandate kicked in, Musk realized there would be a market for ZEV credits due to automakers slow to adapt or who happened to fall short. So he set up a company guaranteed to always have excess ZEV credits. Such a company could even sell each vehicle at a small loss, and still turn a profit due to selling the ZEV credits. So Tesla is the beneficiary of CARB mandating EV sales, not the driving force behind growing EV sales. I think Musk got caught a bit off guard by how difficult it was to scale up production, and how quickly the other automakers were to roll out their own competent EVs.
On the flip side, the other automakers want Tesla to survive. Tesla provides insurance, a safety net - a guaranteed source of ZEV credits should an automaker somehow fail to meet its ZEV percentage. The exotic car makers who don't yet offer an EV rely entirely on Tesla to sell them ZEV credits And because the percentage is mandated by CARB, Big Oil is indifferent to who is selling the EVs. The same number of EVs will be sold each year, whether they're Teslas or other brands, meaning the survival of Tesla doesn't have any effect on oil consumption. So the conspiracy theory that automakers and oil companies want to destroy Tesla is just that - a baseless conspiracy theory.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time CARB tried a ZEV mandate. The last time was in the late 1990s. The ZEV mandate was set to begin in 2000, which is what drove the intense R&D into hybrids and GM to develop the EV1. By the time the mandate was set to kick in, GM had the only viable ZEV. They'd sunk nearly a billion dollars into developing the EV1, but stood to make back many times that from licensing the technology or selling ZEV credits. Then CARB pulled the rug out from under them. The other automakers petitioned CARB saying the technology wasn't yet ready to produce a decent ZEV, and the best they could for now was a hybrid. CARB relented and rescinded the ZEV mandate, basically throwing away the carrot after they'd used it to lead GM into sinking nearly a billion dollars into the EV1. GM was livid, and recalled and destroyed every EV1 and locked away the research so that California would in no way benefit from their bait and switch.
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Poverty level for a single person is $12,140/yr. Which at 2000 work hours/yr (40 hrs/week, 50 weeks/yr) is $6.06/hr. For a family of 4, it's $25,100/yr, which would translate into $12.55/hr.
So in both cases $15/hr would lift you and your family well out of poverty. Only in Alaska would a family of 4 with a single breadwinner making $15/hr still be in poverty.
Reducing living costs in cities is simple - allow more housing to be constructed, build better transportation to make it feasible to live further from work. Unfortunately, most cities are resistant to this, or are bound by geography which prevents expansion.
Tax revenue initially fell after Bush's tax cut, but picked up again after the tech bubble-caused recession. Same for the housing bubble - tax revenue fell during the recession, but returned to historical levels post-recession. In other words, the tax cuts didn't cause the growing deficits and debt.
It's increased spending which is causing the growing deficits. Primarily growth in Social Security, Medicare, and other health programs. Spending on other programs - even defense - has been falling. So Social Security, Medicare, and other health programs are what we need to rein in if we want to get the budget under control. Unfortunately, those are the programs Democrats consider sacrosanct and refuse to allow us to modify.
I'll also point out that the flip side of the stimulus spending under Obama to jump-start the economy, is that once the economy gets going again you reduce spending to below historical levels. Basically government spending should act as a stabilizer, 180 degrees out of phase with the economy (stimulating the economy when it's poor, slowing it down when it's good to prevent it from overheating) The government saves up during good times, so it has a piggy back it can use to spend during bad times.. I agreed that stimulus spending was the correct thing to do after the housing bubble, but opposed it because I knew the second half (reduced spending) would never happen. Leaving us further mired in debt (which went from about 60% of GDP to over 100% under Obama). Unless we get that debt reduced, the only thing saving us right now is the low interest rates. If those go up, the interest on the debt will balloon and begin to dominate the budget.
It makes it really easy to pick out the people who have no clue what they're talking about, and have based their conclusions on idealized beliefs rather than solid engineering data. I concentrate on educating listeners about the difference between power and energy, so they can pick these people out and ignore them like I do. Don't correct the shills and snake oil salesmen - let them continue to make the error.
The situation in cosmology is similar to pre-Relativity right now - we're seeing something which doesn't make sense using the laws of physics we know of. Instead of making the mistake of ignoring opportunity cost and assuming the most popular theory is correct, think of it this way. We know galaxies can't rotate as we see them rotating using classical celestial mechanics and observed mass. So we've got two competing theories to explain the deviation. Dark Matter, where 85% of the mass in the known universe is stuff we've never seen nor detected and have no idea what it is - basically adding a fudge factor to make our observations fit our understanding of physics. Or this guy's quantized inertia theory. Denying him the funding simply because his theory is fringe is nothing more than blind faith in the dark matter theory being correct.
Even if he turns out to be wrong, $1.3 million is not much in the grand scheme of these things. The DoD and DARPA threw a lot more money at psychic phenomenon during the Cold War simply because the Soviets were also researching it, and they couldn't take the chance that there might actually be something to it which the Soviets might discover first Because we learn from history books which only outline what was investigated, most people wrongly assume there are only two possible outcomes here:
There are actually four possible outcomes here:
Like throwing darts, the vast majority of research will fall into the second outcome - investigated and turns out to be wrong. The few shining gems of science (first outcome) are the wheat sifted out of all the chaff via this process. In addition, outcomes two and three and inextricably linked - the less you have of the second, the more you'll get of the third, and vice versa. So decreasing funding for theories which will probably turn out to be incorrect, will increase the number of correct theories we never learn because they were never investigated (throwing the baby out with the bathwater). And trying prevent missing correct theories because we never investigated them, will inevitably lead to more incorrect theories being investigated (casting a wider net will result in catching more trash fish).
The improved economic efficiency is just too massive for buying individual GPUs to continue to make sense for most people. It's actually pretty similar to how Amazon has made a massively successful cloud computing business (AWS). Or how everyone uses Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo mail instead of setting up their own personal mail server.
That said, as you point out the client is pretty immaterial. The way these game streaming services (including Steam In-Home Streaming) work is by converting the game display into a h.264 video stream in real time. To the client, there's very little difference between a streamed game and a streamed movie. And pretty much everything (including low-end cell phones) come with a h.264 hardware decoder nowadays specifically to let you stream movies. So just about anything could be used as the client for streaming games.
More broadly, this is why technology barely advanced for thousands of years. Paranoid craftsmen discovering new techniques but keeping them secret, whispering them to their children while on their deathbed. Except like this guy, a lot of them never managed to pass on the secret, causing it to be lost, only to be discovered again later, to be lost yet again, etc. (We're still trying to figure out how Stradivarius made his violins.) It's not a coincidence that the pace of technological advancement began to pick up around the same time as the printing press - when ideas could be made semi-permanent by publishing, thereby entering them into the shared knowledgebase of the human race.
The Spanish Flu caused a cytokine storm. Basically caused your immune system to overreact, and kill yourself. Consequently, people with strong immune systems - fit and healthy young adults - were the most likely to die from it. Contrast this to modern examples of the flu which mostly picks off children and the elderly.
If the population today is generally healthier than in 1918, something like the Spanish Flu would be even more deadly today than it was then. (Though to be fair, we don't have a World War going on forcing people into tight quarters and to move around the world, spreading the virus.)
The tax shouldn't be for violating right to repair. That's too subjective - some people don't believe in right to repair..
The tax should be for artificially shortening the usable lifespan of the device, causing it to prematurely enter the waste stream. That's objective, indisputable, and quantifiable. If the device (with repairs) is designed to stay in service for 10+ years, then no tax. 7-9 years, 25% tax. 5-6 years, 50%. 3-4 years 100%. 1-2 years 200%. This would also handle the problem of proprietary parts no longer being available for older devices. If a manufacturer wants to use proprietary parts, they have to keep replacement parts in stock for 15+ years to avoid the tax (retroactive if they fail). The alternative is to use non-proprietary parts so replacements can be bought on the open market, freeing the manufacturer from having to keep them in stock themselves.
For brownie points, you could require warranties to extend this long. You have to be careful with that though, since it could shift the economics to where the tax becomes cheaper than the cost of providing warranty service for a decade, causing companies to favor intentionally shortening the lifespan of the device.
"Right to do whatever the hell you want with the stuff you own."
I've said before that if companies want to control how you use the devices they sell you (e.g. printers which reject 3rd party ink cartridges, iPhones which brick themselves if you use a 3rd party replacement screen, etc), then you don't own the device. You're leasing it from the manufacturer. And like when something breaks in the apartment you're leasing, any repair costs need to be paid by the manufacturer, not the lessee. The current scheme being perpetrated by these companies is shifting the cost of ownership onto the buyer, while not giving them full rights of ownership. It's perverse.
That's cost per kW of capacity. Nuclear typically has a capacity factor of 90% - over a year it will produce about 90% of its max capacity. Gas and coal have capacity factors closer to 50%. (gas is typically used for peaking load, since it can scale up and down quickly; it's not run full throttle 24/7). So the $1800 per kW of capacity for gas is closer to $3600 per kW of actual production. Meaning NuScale's $4200/kW is pretty damn close.
It's the same reason why wind and solar appear to do so well by this metric. Onshore wind has a capacity factor of about 22%, solar about 15%. So if you normalize the metric to kW of production (rather than capacity), you end up with wind at about $7500/kW, and PV solar at about $12,300/kW. (PV solar with tracking can approach 30%, which would put it at about $7000/kW.)
That's what gives the allegation a veneer of credibility. Apple has done exactly this (albeit legally) with Samsung - going with slower Toshiba NAND and SK Hynix RAM in their devices instead of Samsung. Trying to have LG manufacture the OLED panels for their iPhones as an alternative to Samsung. Apple's MO among suppliers is like Walmart - use its market dominance to bully suppliers into accepting extremely thin margins ("Well if you won't sign this hundred million dollar contract with us at a lower unit price, then we'll just ink a deal with your competitor instead."). That's partly how they maintain such a huge profit margin (over 20%, vs about 5% for the rest of the computer industry), not just by overcharging customers. But it's a tactic which doesn't work when only one supplier dominates the market.
x86 is CISC. ARM is RISC. CISC vs RISC has played out numerous times since the 1980s. CISC has won every time. I like the idea behind RISC, but its advantages don't seem to beat out the advantages of CISC when it comes to optimized processor performance. RISC seems to have an advantage when rapidly transitioning to new processing regimes (previously high-end data processing with MIPS, currently with low-power processing with ARM). But it's like once the transition has been made or slows down, CISC allows you to optimize it further, resulting in CISC beating out RISC long-term.
You are not the customer. You are the product. Your usage info and access to your computer (to force-install programs) is being sold to the actual customers - companies wanting marketing info and to sell you things.
The difference is Facebook and Google have to give their product away for free to get people to agree to be the product. Microsoft somehow still manages to get people to pay for the "privilege" of becoming the product.
The best products succeed because they are practical, not because they are trendy. That's why Google (which ranked search results based on number of referring links) won out over Altavista (which just used frequency of occurrence) and Yahoo (which used human-picked or -created links). If smartwatches are going to be a thing, then they will succeed with both old and new generation alike. (Which isn't to say someone can't make a fortune marketing them as a fashion trend.)
Driver's license and Social Security number are the most commonly used documents for the I-9 form. Basically, the government doesn't want you hiring aliens and visitors without a work visa, but don't have a system in place for an employer to verify if someone is authorized to work in the country (is a citizen or has a work visa). Rather than put together such a system, the government requires employers to collect the I-9 - it becomes the employer's proof that they did their due diligence and collected the info the government required of them to "determine" work eligibility. (In quotes because the documents are commonly forged, and the employer can't root out forgeries because they'll get in trouble if they mistake real docs for a forgery.)
The tax documents are probably the W-4 form. They're used to determine how much of your paycheck is withheld (sent directly to the IRS) for income taxes. If an employee is dishonest or wrong and the incorrect amount is withheld (usually the employee errs on the low side), it gets corrected on April 15. If the employee had too little withheld, they could face fines. So the employer has to keep the W4 on file as proof that the incorrect withholding wasn't their fault, and they did as the employee told them to do. It's a matter that is entirely between the employee and the IRS, but the IRS doesn't want to do it themselves (employee could submit the W4 to the IRS, and the IRS could tell the employer how much to withhold). So they require employers to do it and force them to keep each employee's W4 on file. This one has always baffled me - the IRS verifies it anyway when the employee files their taxes, so it's not like the IRS would have to do any extra work to handle it themselves instead of foisting the job onto employers..
Both are usually shoved in a filing cabinet and forgotten about, since the government requires you to keep them but they're never used for anything again (unless you happen to be raided by INS or ICE)..
So if some hacker steals your social security and credit card numbers and publishes it on the dark net, he's just fighting censorship because information wants to be free?
IRC was that way because of the anonymity (other services like Usenet required an email address, which back then was almost always based on your real name).. The Wild West was tamed as civilization and the rule of law rolled out. But this sort of bad behavior on the Internet will persist as long as people can interact anonymously.
I firmly believe anonymity has benefits for democracy, but it has this unfortunate drawback as well. We need to come up with ideas for how to keep those advantages while discouraging the disadvantages. The real problems are the people who think this is justification for eliminating anonymity entirely, and the absolutists who defend anonymity to the point where they won't accept any compromise.
The amount of time people are willing to spend researching a product is proportional to how much it costs. So if you're buying a $30,000 car, you're going to spend several weeks researching and trying out different cars to figure out which one you like best before buying.
OTOH, if you're looking for a game app under $10, you're probably going to grab the first one you see which sounds interesting. Prioritizing the cheap ones.
You do realize that nearly all popular car models get a 5-star crash test rating? It's just that for some reason, a car getting a 5-star safety rating becomes a front-page news story only when it's a Tesla.
(This is not to denigrate Tesla's safety engineering. The lead safety engineer at BMW gave a guest lecture at my graduate structural engineering class. To our surprise, safety is dead last in the design process. First the artist designs the basic shape of the car. Then all the engineers design the mechanical and electrical components to fit within the artist-defined shape. Finally the safety engineer is given a budget of (say) 25 kg of steel, and told to add reinforcement to make the car pass the government and insurance institute safety tests. So all it would take to design a safer car is to move the safety engineer earlier in the design process, which I believe Tesla has done.)
Though the manufacturing companies are pandering to the lazy users. The proper way to access a device on your LAN from the Internet is to set up your router with a VPN server. When you're away from home, you connect to your home router via the VPN. That'll give you access to your NAS, your security cameras, your media library, etc. while you're away from home.
But users are too lazy to bother to set up a VPN server (even though many routers now come with one built-in) and manage a dynamic DNS domain name. So manufacturers pander to them by setting up each individual device to be accessible from the cloud. Usually by having the device contact a server via the manufacturer's website, which acts as a go-between for the handshaking between the cloud device when you try to access it from the Internet. That is, the device handles the VPN-like encryption and their server handles tracking your LAN's public IP address (equivalent to dynamic DNS).
By itself this isn't any worse than using a VPN. But multiply it by a half dozen cloud devices, and the chances that every single one of those devices is secure is substantially lower than the chance that your VPN server is secure.
So what's the difference between taxing Apple's profit, versus taxing its sales sufficiently to generate the same tax revenue? In both cases the customer will pay $x for an iPhone, and a certain percentage of that will be sent to the government as tax revenue. In the former case, Apple Inc. is the intermediary so gets to play international shell games to try to avoid taxes. In the latter case, the local Apple Store is the intermediary, and hands the tax revenue directly to the government before it can play shell games. Both taxes have the same result (same percentage of what each customer pays is sent to the government as tax revenue), one is just a helluva lot easier to track and collect than the other.
I've been advocating this for years. People need to stop thinking of taxes as a way to "stick it to x" (where x = rich person, corporation, someone you don't like). And start recognizing taxes for what they are - diverting a part of the country's productivity to the government coffers to fund government programs. Because the economy is circular (every purchase is a sale, every paycheck is an expense), the point where you do the diverting (the person/company who pays the taxes) is irrelevant. If you tax companies, it just gets passed on to the rest of the economy as lower wages, lower dividends, and higher prices. And on average, everyone pays for the corporate tax. Exactly the same as if you converted all the corporate taxes to a sales tax. Or converted all the corporate taxes to an income tax (profit for a company becomes income for someone else, which can be taxed). Or converted all taxes to a corporate tax.
Corporations are just trickier to tax than people because they can exist simultaneously in multiple tax jurisdictions, which is what allows them to shift income around from country to country. People by definition can physically exist in only one place at a time, making it a lot easier to tally up their income or sales (purchases) and tax them.
The distribution of the dots don't appear to form a trend anything like the black line. Looking at the dots, it looks like premature deaths start at an average 4000 years of life lost at 1500 hours worked (6 hours/day @ 5 days/wk, 50 weeks/yr). Rises to an average 6000 years of life lost at 2000 hours worked (8 hours/day). Then drops back down to 4000 years of life lost at 2400 hours worked (9.6 hours/day). Based on the dots, it would appear 1800-2000 hours worked per year is the most dangerous (roughly 7.2-8 hours/day at 5 days/week, 50 weeks/yr). And fewer or more hours worked is healthier.
The huge range in the vertical axis (a difference of 3x to 5x in least/most years of life lost) also suggests the correlation is rather weak. And that other factors matter a lot more than hours worked.
Also, the first graph seems rather obvious. A person working will pick off the lowest-hanging fruit first - complete the tasks first which generate the most productivity for the least effort. Subsequent work is less productive not necessarily because they're tired and less productive, but because the easier tasks have already been done, leaving only the harder tasks which take more time.
Total productivity per worker is actually the product of the two axes (productivity per hour worked times number of hours worked). And that's the figure which matters here. If you're working so many hours that your total productivity actually decreases compared to working fewer hours, then that's incontrovertible proof that you're working too many hours - so many that it's hurting your productivity. That graph would form a nice curve with a peak, which is your optimal number of hours worked for maximum productivity.
The peak for the graph you've presented (productivity per hour worked) would (extending the trendline) be at 0 hours worked. Which does nothing to support the assertion that fewer hours worked is more productive, since no hours worked would result in zero productivity. But it does support my interpretation that workers prioritize tasks to complete the easier most-bang-for-the-buck tasks first.
It's also worth pointing out that most of the camera sensors used in phones are made by Sony (including the camera in the iPhone). A lot of the differences these camera review sites are trumpeting is nothing more than post-processing. That is, if you had the raw image data, you could process it to make one camera's output identical to another's. If you're a serious enough photographer to read DXO Mark's reviews, then you probably already have the post-processing knowledge to overcome most of the flaws they point out in a particular phone's camera.
Sony grabbed the opportunity that Kodak missed. While Kodak was the first company to realize that electronic digital imaging was the future (they developed first the CCD camera in 1975), they didn't have the technological base to manufacture their own sensors on the scale needed to replace film. So they always outsourced that part of their production. This resulted in Kodak holding nothing but patents when digital replaced film. OTOH Sony had the technical capability to manufacture their own sensors, and quickly took over the small camera sensor market.
When tuition, room and board, and supplies cost $63k per year, yeah $130k is a fair cut-off.
Contrary to people thinking that this is somehow being orchestrated by Big Oil or existing automakers trying to slow down the switch to EVs. Tesla is not driving the adoption of EVs, it is the beneficiary. CARB is the one driving the adoption of EVs (California Air Resources Board - the government agency which sets California's air quality standards). CARB instituted a ZEV mandate (Zero Emissions Vehicle) starting a few years back (2014 I think?). Each year, a certain percentage of each automakers' unit sales has to be ZEVs. The formula is a bit complex (there's also a requirement for hybrid sales), but for 2018 the target is about 2.5% ZEVs. It ramps up each year - by 2025 the target will be about 8%. Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle which qualifies as ZEV, but thus far every other ZEV has been an EV.
If an automaker fails to meet the requisite percentage, it must buy ZEV credits from an automaker who exceeded their quota. If they fail to buy enough credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker from being banned from selling to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. No automaker wants to be cut off from a third of the U.S. market, so they're all busy rolling out EVs to comply with CARB. If they haven't sold enough EVs toward the end of the year, they will run sales and incentives to get enough EVs pushed off their lots (which is why California gets the best EV sales - only EVs sold in California count towards the mandate). And failing that, they will buy ZEV credits, usually from Tesla. So the push to sell EVs has nothing to do with Tesla. Tesla could disappear and we'd see the exact same number of EV sold each year - because the percentage is set by CARB, not the market.
Way back before the ZEV mandate kicked in, Musk realized there would be a market for ZEV credits due to automakers slow to adapt or who happened to fall short. So he set up a company guaranteed to always have excess ZEV credits. Such a company could even sell each vehicle at a small loss, and still turn a profit due to selling the ZEV credits. So Tesla is the beneficiary of CARB mandating EV sales, not the driving force behind growing EV sales. I think Musk got caught a bit off guard by how difficult it was to scale up production, and how quickly the other automakers were to roll out their own competent EVs.
On the flip side, the other automakers want Tesla to survive. Tesla provides insurance, a safety net - a guaranteed source of ZEV credits should an automaker somehow fail to meet its ZEV percentage. The exotic car makers who don't yet offer an EV rely entirely on Tesla to sell them ZEV credits And because the percentage is mandated by CARB, Big Oil is indifferent to who is selling the EVs. The same number of EVs will be sold each year, whether they're Teslas or other brands, meaning the survival of Tesla doesn't have any effect on oil consumption. So the conspiracy theory that automakers and oil companies want to destroy Tesla is just that - a baseless conspiracy theory.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time CARB tried a ZEV mandate. The last time was in the late 1990s. The ZEV mandate was set to begin in 2000, which is what drove the intense R&D into hybrids and GM to develop the EV1. By the time the mandate was set to kick in, GM had the only viable ZEV. They'd sunk nearly a billion dollars into developing the EV1, but stood to make back many times that from licensing the technology or selling ZEV credits. Then CARB pulled the rug out from under them. The other automakers petitioned CARB saying the technology wasn't yet ready to produce a decent ZEV, and the best they could for now was a hybrid. CARB relented and rescinded the ZEV mandate, basically throwing away the carrot after they'd used it to lead GM into sinking nearly a billion dollars into the EV1. GM was livid, and recalled and destroyed every EV1 and locked away the research so that California would in no way benefit from their bait and switch.