Why is it every time the nature vs nurture argument comes up, the strongest proponents always seem to argue the two extremes. That everything is up to nature (your genes, hormones, etc), or everything is up to nurture (your character, work ethic, morals, etc)?
Can't people for a moment entertain the possibility that all of these factors contribute to individual behavior? Yes, life deals some people a better set of cards than others. But that doesn't mean you have no control. You still get to decide how well or poorly you play those cards. I was hard-wired to be extremely acrophobic. When I was a child, I couldn't even stand on a second floor balcony. But I didn't just accept that as my fate. I worked against it, exposing myself to heights and gradually acclimating myself to situations which triggered the fear. I still get anxious with heights, and avoid exposing myself to it unnecessarily. But I no longer turn into a puddle of goo just from being a couple stories up.
Obesity is a great example. No we shouldn't tease people for being overweight. But neither should we pretend that it's acceptable. It's one of if not the biggest health risk most people face today. And the campaign against fat shaming seems to have overshot its mark, and is now killing people by making it socially acceptable to be fat.
It actually is related to net neutrality. It's just that what most people think is net neutrality is actually a single example case of the behavior that net neutrality is trying to stop.
The reason net neutrality is a thing is because it prevents ISPs from robbing Peter to pay Paul. Internet fast lanes don't increase average bandwidth. All they do is increase one person's bandwidth at the expense of everyone else. The net result of this is zero - the average bandwidth remains the same. So it costs the ISP nothing to implement this. But they can leverage it to extract more payments from customers - basically pitting customers against each other in a bidding war for the available bandwidth.
This "robbing Peter to pay Paul, and being paid extra to do it" concept is a bit abstract. So it's been made easier to grasp by giving concrete examples - "fast lanes" and "ISPs throttling Netflix." So most people think that's what net neutrality is. But that's just one aspect of it, specifically how it relates to Netflix. The fundamental premise behind net neutrality is that we shouldn't encourage economic activities which allow someone to make more money for no additional effort - robbing Peter to pay Paul by stealing bandwidth from paying customers to give more of it to one customer who agrees to pay a surcharge. If you're going to charge more, the customer should actually get more without it detracting from the experience of other customers.
Landline ISPs are generally loathe to implement this at the customer end, fearing consumer backlash. But have been emboldened (by their government-granted local monopolies - they know their customers don't have another choice) to implement this at the website end. Intentionally throttling certain websites like netflix (thus failing to provide the contracted service their customers paid them for) in an attempt to extort money from that website. So that's how we see net neutrality arguments usually portrayed.
The cellular ISPs however came from the opposite situation as landline ISPs. With landline ISPs, bandwidth was plentiful, and throttling and data caps only became a thing because of certain customers using excessive bandwidth. With cellular data though, bandwidth has always been tight due to slower speeds and a lot more people sharing the bandwidth (basically everyone with a phone in a single 3-7 mile radius cell). So aside from the first couple years when cellular data had no caps, customers have always lived with and expect limits on their data speeds. That's emboldened some cellular ISPs to try to throttle customer data speeds when no throttling is necessary - there's plenty of available bandwidth (like when everyone has been evacuated due to a fire), but they'll throttle a customer because they've exceeded some arbitrary data cap for the month.
Regardless of whether it's implemented at the website end, or the customer end, it's the same thing. ISPs taking advantage of the fact that customers cannot see how the total amount of bandwidth is used, to fool them into thinking the performance they're getting is the best that's possible. And unnecessarily slowing down traffic (when plenty of bandwidth is available) to try to extort more money from either the customer or the website.
And FWIW, I still maintain that we don't need net neutrality. All we need is to prohibit the government-granted monopolies and open up these services to competition. If there's competition, any ISP intentionally degrading a customer's experience to try to convince them or a website to pay more is shooting themselves in the foot. The customer will mention their poor Internet experience to their friends, who will inform them that a different ISP has no such problems. And the customer they're trying to extort more money from will simply cancel service and switch to the other ISP.
Flash itself wasn't bad, just it wasn't a standard, and for the web we should follow standards.
Flash became ubiquitous because web designers were begging the W3C to add scripting and multimedia capability to HTML. But the W3C dragged its feet. Initially, too many members had the idealistic notion that the WWW should remain "pure" for the exchange of scientific papers and personal websites like Berners-Lee originally envisioned, not become a place for glitzy marketing copies. So they refused to add audio and video support to HTML. Later it got sidetracked pushing everything in "the next version", which got delayed as more things got pushed into it. There was a 15 year gap between HTML 4.01 and HTML 5. Web developers started using Flash to accomplish what the W3C failed to implement in the HTML standard.
And if you really want to cry about following standards on the web, you should try reading the history of PHP. It's probably the most organic successful project out there - kludges built upon kludges, patches upon patches. As someone who came from structured languages with well thought-out error checking, I was absolutely horrified when I learned PHP.
This. I've been arguing since the late 1980s (when I first got on the Internet) that banning hate speech doesn't make it go away. It simply drives it underground, swept under the rug out of your sight, but still there. Those who believe banning speech works are basically arguing that sticking your head in the sand makes the threat disappear. If anything, it's much better to have hate speech on public platforms, where you can at least track who is saying it and what they're saying, than to ban it and drive it underground so you'll have no clue what's going on.
If you allow free speech and the amount of hate speech is increasing, the problem is something wrong with your society, not a problem with Freedom of Speech.
Unless you're shorting, the maximum you can lose is your initial investment. Which makes investing a dirt-simple risk proposition, since you automatically know before you invest your money exactly what's the maximum you could lose (all of it). So the amount these people have lost and are suffering is precisely measurable, and was precisely measurable before they ever invested.
If you borrow money to invest (loans or leveraging), or short stocks (where the maximum gain is the value of the stock, while the maximum loss is potentially infinite - the inverse of buying stock) without understanding the risks involved, it's your own fault.
I've bailed out friends and family members with loans - basically invested in them. But it's never affected me financially if they don't pay me back because I made each loan assuming they wouldn't pay me back and I would take a 100% loss. If they do end up paying me back, that's a bonus.
Engineering safety margins (you calculate the maximum stresses, figure out how string the structure would need to be to withstand it, then build it x times stronger) are typically:
Missiles and experimental aircraft - 1.1 to 1.25x
Aircraft carrying passengers - 1.5x
Boats - 2.0 to 2.5x
Cars - 3x
Static structures like buildings - 10x
These are general rule of thumb. Specific parts may have higher or lower safety margins depending on how predictable or unpreditable the stresses will be. I would imagine bridges fall under the same category as buildings. Although suspension bridges have always been a bit of a balancing act between weight and strength. Some quick googling suggests the safety margin for the suspension elements is typically 2.0 to 4.0.
Also, if you're using metal, corrosion is inevitable. Even stainless steel will corrode (it called stainless, not stainnever). You need to adhere to a strict regimen of inspecting the metal parts for corrosion and protecting it painting, lubricating, replacing). It sounds like this bridge used pre-stressed concrete stays instead of metal wire stays. Concrete is extremely strong in compression, but weak in tension. If you pre-compress it with metal rebar, that can make it usable in tensile applications where you normally wouldn't think it would work. Basically, the rebar is pulling the concrete in compression more than the load is pulling it in tension, so the concrete remains in net compression and doesn't fall apart. But that balancing act between tension and compression is highly dependent on the metal rebar suffering minimal corrosion and retaining its strength.
When I was a child, my family took a bunch of flights on vacation in the 1970s. Your ticket was a pre-printed boarding pass which looks kinda like the ones you get today, except they were on shiny magazine paper with three carbon copies. The travel agent you got the tickets from pulled the first carbon copy. I assume that copy was used to notify the airline that you'd booked for that flight. At the airport, the check-in agent gave you stickers for your checked baggage just like today, and pulled the second carbon copy to prevent you from checking in more than your allowed number of bags. I assume the second copy was also used to confirm how many people had showed up for the flight.
When you arrived at the gate, everyone would line up. The first gate agent would confirm your ticket was for that flight, cross-reference your name with a list of people who had bought tickets for that flight, and pull the last carbon copy (at which point the ticket couldn't be used again except for boarding). You then went to a second gate agent who would assign you a seat. If your name wasn't on the list, you got sent to the standby line, and would get a seat only if there were seats left after everyone who was on the list got a seat.
The seat numbers were printed on stickers made out according to the aircraft's layout. The second gate agent would ask how many people were in your party, find a row of seats where you'd fit, pull off the appropriate sticker(s), and stick them on your ticket(s). If you think about it, it's a great way to guarantee no duplicate seats are assigned, and no seats are missed without having to keep track of everything on paper (or computer). When the flight began boarding, you'd present your ticket with the seat sticker before being allowed to board.
If you missed a flight, the coupon book would still have the extra carbon copies, so the agent would know it hadn't been used and the payment for the fare was still valid (all fares were refundable back then, though usually you'd just use the funds to book on a different flight). Although theft of ticket books from travel agencies used to be a thing back then, since the thief could print whatever flights they wanted on them and turn them into cash by asking for a refund..
So no, you don't actually need computers to run an airline or board passengers.
That was my first thought upon reading this. But the last sentence of the summary gives the purpose:
The authentication feature is intended to protect information in the event of the recipient's email account being hijacked.
So it's not supposed to protect against a malicious recipient spreading snapshots of the email you sent them. It's supposed to protect against a lazy recipient not deleting the email as you requested, and a malicious third party getting access to it in the future when they hack the recipient's email account.
Huxley, not Orwell. In Orwell's 1984, the masses are subjugated by an elite. In Huxley's Brave New World, the masses are seduced by all sorts of entertainment and conveniences available in a modern society, so they can be controlled by the elite. Any form of dissent is viewed as socially abnormal, so it was society you had to fear, not retribution by the elite. Actually, I'm not sure if an all-controlling elite even existed (it could be inferred since the social structure would make it possible). It may have just been all of society being self-guided by hedonism and self-appointed morals.
The guy who orchestrated it was Ex-CEO Martin Winterkorn. He hated licensing Mercedes' diesel exhaust fluid technology (which combines ammonia with nitrous oxides to produce nitrogen, water, and CO2). So he specifically tasked his engineers with coming up with a diesel engine which didn't use DEF.*
When he resigned as CEO, he collected a $32 million golden parachute. Fines won't solve the problem. We need jail time.
* (To their credit, the engineers almost succeeded. The earlier 2-liter engines were a disaster - up to 5x the legal limit of NOx emissions (0.2-0.3 g/mi). But the 2015 2-liter diesel engines met EPA emissions limits without using DEF. They're just included in the scandal because they barely exceeded CARB's limits (0.05 g/mi).)
Turnabout is fair play only if you turn it about to the specific people who screwed you over. If an employer didn't inform you about a canceled interview that you wasted time going to, then it would be turnabout for you to not show up at another interview they set up.
If you don't show up at an interview because another employer didn't see fit to keep you informed and you feel turnabout is fair play, then you're just contributing to a race to the bottom. The employer you screwed over will now have no qualms about not informing other applicants, because you screwed them over for an interview, and "turnabout is fair play." Eventually we'll arrive at a state where employers never inform applicants that they weren't hired, and applicants don't show up for interviews whenever they don't want to.
It's the same reason discrimination is wrong. You can't assume a black person is a thief just because another black person you encountered was a thief. Each individual (or in this case, employer) needs to be judged based on their own behavior. If social media is full of complaints by job applicants that a company doesn't keep them informed of their application status, then feel free to skip out on interviews with that company. But skipping out on an interview was company A just because company B didn't keep you informed is prejudice and discrimination. It says more about your lack of reasoning and good judgment than any interview ever could.
There is a contingent that deeply wants to see Tesla fail because they view it as part of the environmental movement, and they see the whole movement as a leftist attack on free enterprise and their way of life. A company like Tesla being successful is counter to their worldview, and they desperately want to see electric cars fail. I have no evidence to prove that there's a connection to the Tesla shorts, but I suspect there is. I suppose that's part of the reason I so desperately want to see the shorts get bankrupted.
This just demonstrates how out of touch you (and many environmentalists) are about the EV market. Tesla's success doesn't counter anyone's worldview, because EVs are not succeeding due to Tesla. They're succeeding because CARB (California Air Resources Board - the regulatory agency which sets emissions standards in California) has set a Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
The mandate basically requires that a certain percentage of each automaker's unit sales each year be ZEVs. Right now that's mostly EVs (Toyota is selling a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle which qualifies). The percentage is gradually increased each year. The formula is a bit complex, but the target is roughly 2.5% ZEVs for 2018, ramping up to 8% by 2025. If an automaker fails to meet the mandated percentage, they must buy credits from another automaker which exceeded it (usually Tesla since they always have excess credits). This is the route most niche car manufacturers like Ferrari have taken. If they fail to buy enough credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, that automaker would be banned from selling cars in about a third 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 tripping over themselves releasing EVs. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the mandated percentage, they offer sales in incentives on the EVs to manufacture demand.
Destroying Tesla would have absolutely no effect on the success of EVs, because their success is being dictated entirely by CARB. It doesn't matter if Tesla makes them, or some other automaker makes them, or all the automakers make them. The percentage of EVs which will be sold each year has already been decided by CARB decree. So shorting Tesla stock or destroying its reputation via fake news will make zero difference to the number of EVs sold each year. And in fact all the other automarkers want Tesla to stay solvent, because Tesla provides a consistent and readily available supply of ZEV credits should they happen to fail to meet their mandated percentage in a year. Without Tesla, each automaker would have to make sure they sell too many EVs each year, to provide a safety buffer against accidentally slipping below CARB's mandated percentage.
Those without the math background to understand differential equations and harmonic oscillation don't understand why a phase shift should exist, so incorrectly attribute it to collusion all the time. Yes sometimes it's collusion. But even in the complete absence of collusion, it will still happen.
Pilot here. Can say the same. But remember that natural-born pilots fly with the guts, literally. You feel the flight in your stomach. You begin flying with glider planes.
This lack of gut-flying, and excessive reliance on simulators for everything, caused the crash of Air France 447: the pilot didn't feel the plane's attitude [falling while leveled] with his guts.
The slow speeds of a glider or private plane require a large change in yaw or pitch to generate substantial g-forces (centripetal acceleration). On an airliner like AF447 flying close to the speed of sound, a small change in yaw or pitch generates large g-forces, which can easily overwhelm your gut feel for what the plane is doing and your sense of the pull of gravity (it's much easier to enter a 1-g turn even when inverted). You're much more reliant on the instruments to determine the attitude of the plane, and the instruments failed in AF447.
Someone who was learning how to fly hired me to put together a computer system for him to run X-Plane as a trainer/simulator, complete with touch-screen for the instruments and controls, a second monitor for the view out the window, and stick and pedal controls. I put it together and got it all running, but for the life of me I couldn't get the joystick calibrated right. It kept wanting to pull to the left, and the amount of x-axis offset adjustment to the joystick necessary to keep it centered seemed to keep drifting.
After struggling to fix the issue for two days, I called the client and told him I would miss the delivery date and that he'd have to wait a few more days while I exchanged some defective hardware. He asked me what the problem was, and I explained how it was pulling to the left. He swore, and said he didn't realize the simulator was going to be that realistic - the real plane he was training on did the same thing. That's when I realized the torque and gyroscopic effects from the single-engine plane was what was causing the yaw to the left, and X-Plane was faithfully simulating it.
Actually, the prices don't need to really go up that much to compensate for increased wages because the lowest paid workers don't actually control a significant percentage of the economy in the first place. With increased minimum wage, people are able to spend more money, creating a healthier economy that actually *helps* business.
While economics is not a zero-sum game, productivity is. Everything that's consumed must be produced. So prices are just the sum total of everyone's wages (how much money they get for producing stuff), divided by the sum total of what everyone produces. If aggregate productivity holds constant while a greater percentage of total wages are going to CEOs, then that leaves less money for everyone else to buy the same amount of stuff. And prices as a proportion of disposable income go up.*
For a minimum wage in particular, economic activity is maximized when the wages people receive is proportional to their contribution to productivity.
If minimum wage workers are being underpaid, then increasing the minimum wage moves their pay closer to their actual productivity. And the minimum wage helps the economy. This is the situation Ford accidentally discovered when he paid his factory workers roughly double the prevailing wage at the time. Workers were universally underpaid, so when he paid them more, they were actually able to afford the cars they were helping to build, which created more demand for cars. That feedback loop increased economic activity (building cars), and helped turn Ford into one of the richest men on the planet.
If minimum wage workers are already being fairly paid, then increasing the minimum wage puts their pay above their actual productivity. And the minimum wage hurts the economy by causing their jobs to become unsustainable for businesses. That creates innovative pressure to reduce the amount of labor to produce the same amount of stuff. e.g. I went to a 24 hour Jack-in-the-Box drive-thru at 4 am, and person taking my order had a Southern accent. When I got to the window, the person had no accent and said he was there alone. Jack-in-the-Box was routing their drive-thru orders over the Internet to a central location, so a single worker there could take the orders for multiple locations, thus increasing the productivity of that one order-taker so it was worth paying his minimum wage. But that also reduced the number of order-takers needed overall, resulting in a net decrease in number of jobs and wages.
* The catch is that we're assuming aggregate productivity holds constant. If you look at GDP per capita, the U.S. is near the top despite having high income inequality. Likewise, Communist countries (which strive for extreme equality) are near the bottom. So some income inequality is necessary to maximize average productivity. The question becomes how much inequality you're willing to tolerate in order to achieve higher productivity. Or conversely, how much productivity you're willing to give up in order to achieve greater equality. There's no single "right" answer here - some countries will want greater equality, some greater productivity.
Suppose the FBI had asked Google: Please let us know if you have records of one person being at at least three of these armed robberies, within 5-10 minutes of when the robbery occurred.
That would identify approximately one person, the armed robber. If Google has that information, I don't see why the FBI shouldn't ask for it.
Is it really that bad for the government to get all that information on everyone who traversed those areas at those times, when Google already has it?
Seems to me that if you're upset at the government trying to get that info, you should also be upset that Google has been recording it.
For the current stance of environmentalists to make sense, there needs to be just the right amount of climate change. Enough that we need to stop using fossil fuels ASAP. But not so much that we need to switch over completely to nuclear power ASAP. By their reasoning, the rate of climate change falls within a narrow band in between, where we must stop using fossil fuels, but we still have plenty of time to develop renewable power technologies so they become economically feasible.
That's the kind of messed up reasoning you come up with when you start with a conclusion ("we must develop renewables"), and then create a rationale to justify your conclusion. It's gradually becoming clear that we're far outside that narrow band, and need to go all-out nuclear to save life on Earth. That is, the fate of life on Earth is more important than your renewable power agenda.
Remember, nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. All we need is to switch to it quickly enough to break our fossil fuel addiction and arrest non-cyclical CO2 emissions. Once we've done that and the global climate is no longer in danger, then we can develop renewable power at our leisure. And when it (and battery technology) becomes capable of taking over base load, we can use it to phase out nuclear power. This "the only acceptable solution is renewables" mentality is dangerous.
It's just the pick two rule. You can have these things made good, fast, or cheap - pick two.
Invariably, the first adopters pick "fast" and "cheap". The incentive to pick "good" doesn't appear until after a few catastrophic failure cases result in large negative consequences (bad publicity, loss of your job, government regulation, jail time) for failing to pick "good".
In tomography, you shoot a known signal through a target at a certain location and direction. Then based on how the signal is altered at your receiver, you back out what it could've gone through to cause that alteration. Do this at enough locations and directions, and you can build up a picture of what's in between. Basically how a CAT scan works (Computer Aided Tomography - shoots x-rays through the body in different directions).
There's nothing particularly new about tomography. It's been known about and used for decades (though it didn't really take off until computers could do the grunt work of crunching the numbers). What's new here is that they're using WiFi signals (microwaves) instead of x-rays, and their transmitter and receiver are just a regular WiFi router and access card. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that such commercial grade equipment has enough sensitivity to be used this way. If you take the sensitivity of a modern cellular phone radio (typically transmits at 100-250 mW) and convert it to the visual spectrum, it's roughly equivalent to (assuming no line of sight issues) standing in Washington D.C. and being able tell if a candle (about 1 Watt of light) has been lit in Philadelphia 140 miles away.
You don't need to afford health care in the U.S. to take advantage of it. By law, hospitals are required to treat anyone who walks into the emergency room with a genuine medical emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. That's part of the reason hospital bills are so high for patients who can pay - the hospitals have to pass their uncompensated losses onto their paying clients. Also, the vast majority of the country (around 90%) has health insurance, either self-bought or provided by their employer. It's been a legal requirement since 2010 to have insurance. Those who don't have it are breaking the law, and have only themselves to blame if they end up saddled with medical bills they can't afford.
The bigger problems are a tendency for people to put off getting treatment until a problem becomes worse and more expensive to treat (because they don't want to be stuck with a bill for a doctor's visit), and corruption at the physician, insurance, litigation, and government level.
It's more like 25% of the population considers one news fake, another 25% considers the opposite news to be fake. Those of us in the middle 50% find all the shenanigans by those on the two extremes to be exasperating, and would be happy to see both their conspiracy theories banned as fake.
Sequestration is only being explored because we don't want to pay the energy price to break apart the carbon dioxide. The entire reason fossil fuels are such a tempting energy source is that their CO2 and H2O end products sit at very low energy states, meaning burning the fuel to produce CO2 and H2O gives off a lot of energy. But if you're willing to dump enough energy into CO2, you can simply break it apart into oxygen gas and some other carbon compound.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to do this with energy produced from burning fossil fuels. But doing it with energy from renewable sources and nuclear power makes sense. Nuclear is the more interesting option since we already have the technology available to do this and know how to scale it up to the massive levels necessary to counter and even reverse CO2 emissions. We'd just need to construct more nuclear power plants.
Why don't renewables scale as well? Replacing a Fukushima-sized nuclear plant (4700 MW nameplate capacity, about 4200 MW after factoring in 0.9 capacity factor) with wind power would require something like 18.7 GW of wind turbines due to wind's lower capacity factor (0.20-0.25). That would require around 430 km^2 of land area based on the land use of smaller wind farms. (Using Fukushima as a comparison since I already did the math back in 2011. Incidentally, the Fukushima evacuation zone is only 371 km^2. And the land area occupied by wind farms in most populated climates is not habitable due to the danger of ice throws.)
This plant would produce (4200 MW)*(8766 hours/yr) = 36.8 TWh of energy per year. Since the world produces about 130,000 TWh from fossil fuels each year, you'd need at least 350 such plants to offset global CO2 emissions. Multiply it by 2 to factor in inefficiencies in the process. And you get (2*350)*(430 km^2) = 301000 km^2 of land area covered by wind turbines, or about the size of Italy. But it can't just be any land area, the land also has to have strong and consistent winds. Otherwise you'll need even more turbines and more land area.
If you used 1.5 MW turbines @ $3 million each, 12,500 such turbines would have a construction cost of $37.5 billion, which is more than what the nuclear plant would cost. Solar is even worse since its capacity factor is lower than wind's, and its cost per MW about 3-7x higher. Of course, planting trees is a whole lot cheaper, as long as you're willing to chop them down after a few decades and bury them in deep abandoned mine shafts, and re-plant them.
Commercial buildings are depreciated over 39 years. That is, the building's construction cost is a business expense, and thus tax deductible (you don't pay tax on the money you spent on expenses). But because it's a purchase that's used for so long, you're not allowed to deduct the whole thing in a single year. Instead, you take the building's construction cost, and divide it (depreciate it) over 39 years, and use that as your annual tax deduction.
If Apple says the building is only worth $200, then their tax deduction for building depreciation over the next 39 years can only be a maximum of $5.13 per year. So either they pay the property tax on a $1 billion building (which at Prop 13's 1% cap and utilities of about 1% works out to about $20 million/yr in taxes), or they lose an annual tax deduction of ($1 billion) / (39 years) = $25.6 million (which at the 35% corporate tax rate would be $8.96 million/yr).
I suspect what's going on is some accountant did this math and decided it would be cheaper to give up building depreciation in exchange for a lower tax assessment. But now their gig has been discovered and they're at risk of both losing the building depreciation tax deduction, while having it assessed at its full value for property taxes. If that's not what they're doing, and they're audaciously depreciating the building by $25.6 million on this year's taxes while simultaneously claiming it's only worth $200 for property tax assessment, then this is simple. They've legally admitted to the IRS that the building is worth $1 billion. Claiming to the assessor that it's only worth $200 constitutes fraud and possibly perjury.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it every time the nature vs nurture argument comes up, the strongest proponents always seem to argue the two extremes. That everything is up to nature (your genes, hormones, etc), or everything is up to nurture (your character, work ethic, morals, etc)?
Can't people for a moment entertain the possibility that all of these factors contribute to individual behavior? Yes, life deals some people a better set of cards than others. But that doesn't mean you have no control. You still get to decide how well or poorly you play those cards. I was hard-wired to be extremely acrophobic. When I was a child, I couldn't even stand on a second floor balcony. But I didn't just accept that as my fate. I worked against it, exposing myself to heights and gradually acclimating myself to situations which triggered the fear. I still get anxious with heights, and avoid exposing myself to it unnecessarily. But I no longer turn into a puddle of goo just from being a couple stories up.
Obesity is a great example. No we shouldn't tease people for being overweight. But neither should we pretend that it's acceptable. It's one of if not the biggest health risk most people face today. And the campaign against fat shaming seems to have overshot its mark, and is now killing people by making it socially acceptable to be fat.
It actually is related to net neutrality. It's just that what most people think is net neutrality is actually a single example case of the behavior that net neutrality is trying to stop.
The reason net neutrality is a thing is because it prevents ISPs from robbing Peter to pay Paul. Internet fast lanes don't increase average bandwidth. All they do is increase one person's bandwidth at the expense of everyone else. The net result of this is zero - the average bandwidth remains the same. So it costs the ISP nothing to implement this. But they can leverage it to extract more payments from customers - basically pitting customers against each other in a bidding war for the available bandwidth.
This "robbing Peter to pay Paul, and being paid extra to do it" concept is a bit abstract. So it's been made easier to grasp by giving concrete examples - "fast lanes" and "ISPs throttling Netflix." So most people think that's what net neutrality is. But that's just one aspect of it, specifically how it relates to Netflix. The fundamental premise behind net neutrality is that we shouldn't encourage economic activities which allow someone to make more money for no additional effort - robbing Peter to pay Paul by stealing bandwidth from paying customers to give more of it to one customer who agrees to pay a surcharge. If you're going to charge more, the customer should actually get more without it detracting from the experience of other customers.
Landline ISPs are generally loathe to implement this at the customer end, fearing consumer backlash. But have been emboldened (by their government-granted local monopolies - they know their customers don't have another choice) to implement this at the website end. Intentionally throttling certain websites like netflix (thus failing to provide the contracted service their customers paid them for) in an attempt to extort money from that website. So that's how we see net neutrality arguments usually portrayed.
The cellular ISPs however came from the opposite situation as landline ISPs. With landline ISPs, bandwidth was plentiful, and throttling and data caps only became a thing because of certain customers using excessive bandwidth. With cellular data though, bandwidth has always been tight due to slower speeds and a lot more people sharing the bandwidth (basically everyone with a phone in a single 3-7 mile radius cell). So aside from the first couple years when cellular data had no caps, customers have always lived with and expect limits on their data speeds. That's emboldened some cellular ISPs to try to throttle customer data speeds when no throttling is necessary - there's plenty of available bandwidth (like when everyone has been evacuated due to a fire), but they'll throttle a customer because they've exceeded some arbitrary data cap for the month.
Regardless of whether it's implemented at the website end, or the customer end, it's the same thing. ISPs taking advantage of the fact that customers cannot see how the total amount of bandwidth is used, to fool them into thinking the performance they're getting is the best that's possible. And unnecessarily slowing down traffic (when plenty of bandwidth is available) to try to extort more money from either the customer or the website.
And FWIW, I still maintain that we don't need net neutrality. All we need is to prohibit the government-granted monopolies and open up these services to competition. If there's competition, any ISP intentionally degrading a customer's experience to try to convince them or a website to pay more is shooting themselves in the foot. The customer will mention their poor Internet experience to their friends, who will inform them that a different ISP has no such problems. And the customer they're trying to extort more money from will simply cancel service and switch to the other ISP.
Flash became ubiquitous because web designers were begging the W3C to add scripting and multimedia capability to HTML. But the W3C dragged its feet. Initially, too many members had the idealistic notion that the WWW should remain "pure" for the exchange of scientific papers and personal websites like Berners-Lee originally envisioned, not become a place for glitzy marketing copies. So they refused to add audio and video support to HTML. Later it got sidetracked pushing everything in "the next version", which got delayed as more things got pushed into it. There was a 15 year gap between HTML 4.01 and HTML 5. Web developers started using Flash to accomplish what the W3C failed to implement in the HTML standard.
And if you really want to cry about following standards on the web, you should try reading the history of PHP. It's probably the most organic successful project out there - kludges built upon kludges, patches upon patches. As someone who came from structured languages with well thought-out error checking, I was absolutely horrified when I learned PHP.
This. I've been arguing since the late 1980s (when I first got on the Internet) that banning hate speech doesn't make it go away. It simply drives it underground, swept under the rug out of your sight, but still there. Those who believe banning speech works are basically arguing that sticking your head in the sand makes the threat disappear. If anything, it's much better to have hate speech on public platforms, where you can at least track who is saying it and what they're saying, than to ban it and drive it underground so you'll have no clue what's going on.
If you allow free speech and the amount of hate speech is increasing, the problem is something wrong with your society, not a problem with Freedom of Speech.
Unless you're shorting, the maximum you can lose is your initial investment. Which makes investing a dirt-simple risk proposition, since you automatically know before you invest your money exactly what's the maximum you could lose (all of it). So the amount these people have lost and are suffering is precisely measurable, and was precisely measurable before they ever invested.
If you borrow money to invest (loans or leveraging), or short stocks (where the maximum gain is the value of the stock, while the maximum loss is potentially infinite - the inverse of buying stock) without understanding the risks involved, it's your own fault.
I've bailed out friends and family members with loans - basically invested in them. But it's never affected me financially if they don't pay me back because I made each loan assuming they wouldn't pay me back and I would take a 100% loss. If they do end up paying me back, that's a bonus.
These are general rule of thumb. Specific parts may have higher or lower safety margins depending on how predictable or unpreditable the stresses will be. I would imagine bridges fall under the same category as buildings. Although suspension bridges have always been a bit of a balancing act between weight and strength. Some quick googling suggests the safety margin for the suspension elements is typically 2.0 to 4.0.
Also, if you're using metal, corrosion is inevitable. Even stainless steel will corrode (it called stainless, not stainnever). You need to adhere to a strict regimen of inspecting the metal parts for corrosion and protecting it painting, lubricating, replacing). It sounds like this bridge used pre-stressed concrete stays instead of metal wire stays. Concrete is extremely strong in compression, but weak in tension. If you pre-compress it with metal rebar, that can make it usable in tensile applications where you normally wouldn't think it would work. Basically, the rebar is pulling the concrete in compression more than the load is pulling it in tension, so the concrete remains in net compression and doesn't fall apart. But that balancing act between tension and compression is highly dependent on the metal rebar suffering minimal corrosion and retaining its strength.
Tempered glass is another example of how pre-stressing a fragile material to keep it under compression can make it stronger (strong enough to survive being shot by a bullet).
When I was a child, my family took a bunch of flights on vacation in the 1970s. Your ticket was a pre-printed boarding pass which looks kinda like the ones you get today, except they were on shiny magazine paper with three carbon copies. The travel agent you got the tickets from pulled the first carbon copy. I assume that copy was used to notify the airline that you'd booked for that flight. At the airport, the check-in agent gave you stickers for your checked baggage just like today, and pulled the second carbon copy to prevent you from checking in more than your allowed number of bags. I assume the second copy was also used to confirm how many people had showed up for the flight.
When you arrived at the gate, everyone would line up. The first gate agent would confirm your ticket was for that flight, cross-reference your name with a list of people who had bought tickets for that flight, and pull the last carbon copy (at which point the ticket couldn't be used again except for boarding). You then went to a second gate agent who would assign you a seat. If your name wasn't on the list, you got sent to the standby line, and would get a seat only if there were seats left after everyone who was on the list got a seat.
The seat numbers were printed on stickers made out according to the aircraft's layout. The second gate agent would ask how many people were in your party, find a row of seats where you'd fit, pull off the appropriate sticker(s), and stick them on your ticket(s). If you think about it, it's a great way to guarantee no duplicate seats are assigned, and no seats are missed without having to keep track of everything on paper (or computer). When the flight began boarding, you'd present your ticket with the seat sticker before being allowed to board.
If you missed a flight, the coupon book would still have the extra carbon copies, so the agent would know it hadn't been used and the payment for the fare was still valid (all fares were refundable back then, though usually you'd just use the funds to book on a different flight). Although theft of ticket books from travel agencies used to be a thing back then, since the thief could print whatever flights they wanted on them and turn them into cash by asking for a refund..
So no, you don't actually need computers to run an airline or board passengers.
So it's not supposed to protect against a malicious recipient spreading snapshots of the email you sent them. It's supposed to protect against a lazy recipient not deleting the email as you requested, and a malicious third party getting access to it in the future when they hack the recipient's email account.
Huxley, not Orwell. In Orwell's 1984, the masses are subjugated by an elite. In Huxley's Brave New World, the masses are seduced by all sorts of entertainment and conveniences available in a modern society, so they can be controlled by the elite. Any form of dissent is viewed as socially abnormal, so it was society you had to fear, not retribution by the elite. Actually, I'm not sure if an all-controlling elite even existed (it could be inferred since the social structure would make it possible). It may have just been all of society being self-guided by hedonism and self-appointed morals.
The guy who orchestrated it was Ex-CEO Martin Winterkorn. He hated licensing Mercedes' diesel exhaust fluid technology (which combines ammonia with nitrous oxides to produce nitrogen, water, and CO2). So he specifically tasked his engineers with coming up with a diesel engine which didn't use DEF.*
When he resigned as CEO, he collected a $32 million golden parachute. Fines won't solve the problem. We need jail time.
* (To their credit, the engineers almost succeeded. The earlier 2-liter engines were a disaster - up to 5x the legal limit of NOx emissions (0.2-0.3 g/mi). But the 2015 2-liter diesel engines met EPA emissions limits without using DEF. They're just included in the scandal because they barely exceeded CARB's limits (0.05 g/mi).)
Turnabout is fair play only if you turn it about to the specific people who screwed you over. If an employer didn't inform you about a canceled interview that you wasted time going to, then it would be turnabout for you to not show up at another interview they set up.
If you don't show up at an interview because another employer didn't see fit to keep you informed and you feel turnabout is fair play, then you're just contributing to a race to the bottom. The employer you screwed over will now have no qualms about not informing other applicants, because you screwed them over for an interview, and "turnabout is fair play." Eventually we'll arrive at a state where employers never inform applicants that they weren't hired, and applicants don't show up for interviews whenever they don't want to.
It's the same reason discrimination is wrong. You can't assume a black person is a thief just because another black person you encountered was a thief. Each individual (or in this case, employer) needs to be judged based on their own behavior. If social media is full of complaints by job applicants that a company doesn't keep them informed of their application status, then feel free to skip out on interviews with that company. But skipping out on an interview was company A just because company B didn't keep you informed is prejudice and discrimination. It says more about your lack of reasoning and good judgment than any interview ever could.
This just demonstrates how out of touch you (and many environmentalists) are about the EV market. Tesla's success doesn't counter anyone's worldview, because EVs are not succeeding due to Tesla. They're succeeding because CARB (California Air Resources Board - the regulatory agency which sets emissions standards in California) has set a Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) mandate.
The mandate basically requires that a certain percentage of each automaker's unit sales each year be ZEVs. Right now that's mostly EVs (Toyota is selling a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle which qualifies). The percentage is gradually increased each year. The formula is a bit complex, but the target is roughly 2.5% ZEVs for 2018, ramping up to 8% by 2025. If an automaker fails to meet the mandated percentage, they must buy credits from another automaker which exceeded it (usually Tesla since they always have excess credits). This is the route most niche car manufacturers like Ferrari have taken. If they fail to buy enough credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, that automaker would be banned from selling cars in about a third 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 tripping over themselves releasing EVs. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the mandated percentage, they offer sales in incentives on the EVs to manufacture demand.
Destroying Tesla would have absolutely no effect on the success of EVs, because their success is being dictated entirely by CARB. It doesn't matter if Tesla makes them, or some other automaker makes them, or all the automakers make them. The percentage of EVs which will be sold each year has already been decided by CARB decree. So shorting Tesla stock or destroying its reputation via fake news will make zero difference to the number of EVs sold each year. And in fact all the other automarkers want Tesla to stay solvent, because Tesla provides a consistent and readily available supply of ZEV credits should they happen to fail to meet their mandated percentage in a year. Without Tesla, each automaker would have to make sure they sell too many EVs each year, to provide a safety buffer against accidentally slipping below CARB's mandated percentage.
If you've been building/buying computers for a while, you've seen numerous cycles of high/low memory prices. It's not collusion. It's simply production lagging as it tries to match changes in demand.
Those without the math background to understand differential equations and harmonic oscillation don't understand why a phase shift should exist, so incorrectly attribute it to collusion all the time. Yes sometimes it's collusion. But even in the complete absence of collusion, it will still happen.
It boils down to fashion. Women's pants are tight. Men's pants are baggy.
Centripital acceleration is equal to velocity squared over the radius of the turn.
The slow speeds of a glider or private plane require a large change in yaw or pitch to generate substantial g-forces (centripetal acceleration). On an airliner like AF447 flying close to the speed of sound, a small change in yaw or pitch generates large g-forces, which can easily overwhelm your gut feel for what the plane is doing and your sense of the pull of gravity (it's much easier to enter a 1-g turn even when inverted). You're much more reliant on the instruments to determine the attitude of the plane, and the instruments failed in AF447.
Someone who was learning how to fly hired me to put together a computer system for him to run X-Plane as a trainer/simulator, complete with touch-screen for the instruments and controls, a second monitor for the view out the window, and stick and pedal controls. I put it together and got it all running, but for the life of me I couldn't get the joystick calibrated right. It kept wanting to pull to the left, and the amount of x-axis offset adjustment to the joystick necessary to keep it centered seemed to keep drifting.
After struggling to fix the issue for two days, I called the client and told him I would miss the delivery date and that he'd have to wait a few more days while I exchanged some defective hardware. He asked me what the problem was, and I explained how it was pulling to the left. He swore, and said he didn't realize the simulator was going to be that realistic - the real plane he was training on did the same thing. That's when I realized the torque and gyroscopic effects from the single-engine plane was what was causing the yaw to the left, and X-Plane was faithfully simulating it.
While economics is not a zero-sum game, productivity is. Everything that's consumed must be produced. So prices are just the sum total of everyone's wages (how much money they get for producing stuff), divided by the sum total of what everyone produces. If aggregate productivity holds constant while a greater percentage of total wages are going to CEOs, then that leaves less money for everyone else to buy the same amount of stuff. And prices as a proportion of disposable income go up.*
For a minimum wage in particular, economic activity is maximized when the wages people receive is proportional to their contribution to productivity.
* The catch is that we're assuming aggregate productivity holds constant. If you look at GDP per capita, the U.S. is near the top despite having high income inequality. Likewise, Communist countries (which strive for extreme equality) are near the bottom. So some income inequality is necessary to maximize average productivity. The question becomes how much inequality you're willing to tolerate in order to achieve higher productivity. Or conversely, how much productivity you're willing to give up in order to achieve greater equality. There's no single "right" answer here - some countries will want greater equality, some greater productivity.
Is it really that bad for the government to get all that information on everyone who traversed those areas at those times, when Google already has it?
Seems to me that if you're upset at the government trying to get that info, you should also be upset that Google has been recording it.
For the current stance of environmentalists to make sense, there needs to be just the right amount of climate change. Enough that we need to stop using fossil fuels ASAP. But not so much that we need to switch over completely to nuclear power ASAP. By their reasoning, the rate of climate change falls within a narrow band in between, where we must stop using fossil fuels, but we still have plenty of time to develop renewable power technologies so they become economically feasible.
That's the kind of messed up reasoning you come up with when you start with a conclusion ("we must develop renewables"), and then create a rationale to justify your conclusion. It's gradually becoming clear that we're far outside that narrow band, and need to go all-out nuclear to save life on Earth. That is, the fate of life on Earth is more important than your renewable power agenda.
Remember, nuclear power doesn't have to be the end game. All we need is to switch to it quickly enough to break our fossil fuel addiction and arrest non-cyclical CO2 emissions. Once we've done that and the global climate is no longer in danger, then we can develop renewable power at our leisure. And when it (and battery technology) becomes capable of taking over base load, we can use it to phase out nuclear power. This "the only acceptable solution is renewables" mentality is dangerous.
It's just the pick two rule. You can have these things made good, fast, or cheap - pick two.
Invariably, the first adopters pick "fast" and "cheap". The incentive to pick "good" doesn't appear until after a few catastrophic failure cases result in large negative consequences (bad publicity, loss of your job, government regulation, jail time) for failing to pick "good".
In tomography, you shoot a known signal through a target at a certain location and direction. Then based on how the signal is altered at your receiver, you back out what it could've gone through to cause that alteration. Do this at enough locations and directions, and you can build up a picture of what's in between. Basically how a CAT scan works (Computer Aided Tomography - shoots x-rays through the body in different directions).
There's nothing particularly new about tomography. It's been known about and used for decades (though it didn't really take off until computers could do the grunt work of crunching the numbers). What's new here is that they're using WiFi signals (microwaves) instead of x-rays, and their transmitter and receiver are just a regular WiFi router and access card. I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that such commercial grade equipment has enough sensitivity to be used this way. If you take the sensitivity of a modern cellular phone radio (typically transmits at 100-250 mW) and convert it to the visual spectrum, it's roughly equivalent to (assuming no line of sight issues) standing in Washington D.C. and being able tell if a candle (about 1 Watt of light) has been lit in Philadelphia 140 miles away.
You don't need to afford health care in the U.S. to take advantage of it. By law, hospitals are required to treat anyone who walks into the emergency room with a genuine medical emergency, regardless of their ability to pay. That's part of the reason hospital bills are so high for patients who can pay - the hospitals have to pass their uncompensated losses onto their paying clients. Also, the vast majority of the country (around 90%) has health insurance, either self-bought or provided by their employer. It's been a legal requirement since 2010 to have insurance. Those who don't have it are breaking the law, and have only themselves to blame if they end up saddled with medical bills they can't afford.
The bigger problems are a tendency for people to put off getting treatment until a problem becomes worse and more expensive to treat (because they don't want to be stuck with a bill for a doctor's visit), and corruption at the physician, insurance, litigation, and government level.
It's more like 25% of the population considers one news fake, another 25% considers the opposite news to be fake. Those of us in the middle 50% find all the shenanigans by those on the two extremes to be exasperating, and would be happy to see both their conspiracy theories banned as fake.
Sequestration is only being explored because we don't want to pay the energy price to break apart the carbon dioxide. The entire reason fossil fuels are such a tempting energy source is that their CO2 and H2O end products sit at very low energy states, meaning burning the fuel to produce CO2 and H2O gives off a lot of energy. But if you're willing to dump enough energy into CO2, you can simply break it apart into oxygen gas and some other carbon compound.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to do this with energy produced from burning fossil fuels. But doing it with energy from renewable sources and nuclear power makes sense. Nuclear is the more interesting option since we already have the technology available to do this and know how to scale it up to the massive levels necessary to counter and even reverse CO2 emissions. We'd just need to construct more nuclear power plants.
Why don't renewables scale as well? Replacing a Fukushima-sized nuclear plant (4700 MW nameplate capacity, about 4200 MW after factoring in 0.9 capacity factor) with wind power would require something like 18.7 GW of wind turbines due to wind's lower capacity factor (0.20-0.25). That would require around 430 km^2 of land area based on the land use of smaller wind farms. (Using Fukushima as a comparison since I already did the math back in 2011. Incidentally, the Fukushima evacuation zone is only 371 km^2. And the land area occupied by wind farms in most populated climates is not habitable due to the danger of ice throws.)
This plant would produce (4200 MW)*(8766 hours/yr) = 36.8 TWh of energy per year. Since the world produces about 130,000 TWh from fossil fuels each year, you'd need at least 350 such plants to offset global CO2 emissions. Multiply it by 2 to factor in inefficiencies in the process. And you get (2*350)*(430 km^2) = 301000 km^2 of land area covered by wind turbines, or about the size of Italy. But it can't just be any land area, the land also has to have strong and consistent winds. Otherwise you'll need even more turbines and more land area.
If you used 1.5 MW turbines @ $3 million each, 12,500 such turbines would have a construction cost of $37.5 billion, which is more than what the nuclear plant would cost. Solar is even worse since its capacity factor is lower than wind's, and its cost per MW about 3-7x higher. Of course, planting trees is a whole lot cheaper, as long as you're willing to chop them down after a few decades and bury them in deep abandoned mine shafts, and re-plant them.
Commercial buildings are depreciated over 39 years. That is, the building's construction cost is a business expense, and thus tax deductible (you don't pay tax on the money you spent on expenses). But because it's a purchase that's used for so long, you're not allowed to deduct the whole thing in a single year. Instead, you take the building's construction cost, and divide it (depreciate it) over 39 years, and use that as your annual tax deduction.
If Apple says the building is only worth $200, then their tax deduction for building depreciation over the next 39 years can only be a maximum of $5.13 per year. So either they pay the property tax on a $1 billion building (which at Prop 13's 1% cap and utilities of about 1% works out to about $20 million/yr in taxes), or they lose an annual tax deduction of ($1 billion) / (39 years) = $25.6 million (which at the 35% corporate tax rate would be $8.96 million/yr).
I suspect what's going on is some accountant did this math and decided it would be cheaper to give up building depreciation in exchange for a lower tax assessment. But now their gig has been discovered and they're at risk of both losing the building depreciation tax deduction, while having it assessed at its full value for property taxes. If that's not what they're doing, and they're audaciously depreciating the building by $25.6 million on this year's taxes while simultaneously claiming it's only worth $200 for property tax assessment, then this is simple. They've legally admitted to the IRS that the building is worth $1 billion. Claiming to the assessor that it's only worth $200 constitutes fraud and possibly perjury.