Lack of controversy in foreign relations simply means that nothing is happening - the status quo is being maintained. Which is great if you're happy with the status quo. But the majority of the world still lives under repressive regimes. So I'd classify maintaining the status quo as a foreign relations failure; a path chosen by a leader who was too afraid to take risks to try to change the world for the better.
I'm scared to death of how Trump is handling foreign relations. But I readily admit he's shaking things up, and the world will not be the same when he leaves office. Whether it's better or worse remains to be seen. But the Cold War didn't end because we maintained the status quo. Those of you who weren't alive at the time probably don't realize how much flak Reagan caught for "provoking" the Soviets by calling it an evil empire. Likewise, Korea has remained divided for nearly 70 years because we sought to maintain the status quo there. At some point you have to trust that on average things done by free democracies make the world better. So shaking things up on average yields better results than maintaining the status quo. Just like investing in stocks on average yields better returns than putting your money in a savings account, on average it's better to roll the dice than to play it safe.
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is stepping into the online video piracy debate and calling for criminal charges against violators
I'm OK with that, if we also make it a crime to falsely claim a violation of your copyright when clearly no such violation exists. If some copyright association entity gets your YouTube video pulled because their automated algorithm mistakes the cadence of birds singing in the background for a copyrighted song, someone at that association has to go to jail.
It will also make Nikon happy, because they now have a very good reason to release the all same lenses they have released for decades re-engineered for mirrorlessâ(TM)s shorter flange distance, i.e. making them smaller and lighter.
Mirrorless only benefits wide-angle lenses. Specifically, lenses with a focal length shorter than the distance from the lens mount to the sensor (that is what focal length literally is - distance from the lens to the plane it's focusing on). In a SLR, the traveling mirror meant the rear-most lens element had to be further than a certain minimum distance from the sensor. To produce focal lengths shorter than that (wide-angle lenses) required a retrofocus lens design. Basically two lenses on top of each other. One is the real wide-angle lens that you want. A second is a lens to take the light from that wide-angle lens and shift its image so it emanates from a virtual lens which sits in the mirror's path. The second lens is the reason for the higher cost (and larger size) of wide-angle lenses for SLRs.
With a mirrorless camera, you no longer need a retrofocus design. You can simply take the wide-angle lens and mount it at its focal length from the sensor. Mirrorless makes no difference to normal and telephoto lenses, and thus offers no benefits at those focal lengths (other than smaller body size). And in fact the focus range for some existing SLR lenses may not work with the smaller distance between the mount and sensor of a mirrorless body. You'll either need a spacing adapter to place it at its SLR mount distance, or the lens' focus mechanism will need to be redesigned.
In 1990, Robbins' claimed that, without government subsidized water rights, a dollar hamburger in the US would cost $6. I don't know if that's factual because there aren't many sources or studies to cross reference, but such an estimate goes a long way in explaining why the market is, in my humble opinion, so controlled.
The market is controlled because of the foot shortages we experienced after the Dust Bowl which exacerbated the Great Depression. That's when the government realized, holy crap it's really possible for a modern developed country to not produce enough food to feed itself. Consequently, we enacted all sorts of subsidies to insure there's always an oversupply of food. It's why we pay farmers not to plant anything - so if another dust bowl should wipe out a large chunk of the country's farmland, we have plenty of reserve farmland ready and available to immediately go back into production.
The consequence of all these subsidies is overproduction. That leads to the market price dropping to unsustainable levels (farmers cannot sell their crops for enough to cover their expenses). That's where the other government subsidies come in. The government buys all these crops at a fixed price, thus allowing the farmers to stay in business. The government then acts as a monopoly source and resells the food at a higher price to distributors like supermarkets. That lets them recoup most of the subsidy (but not all - the discrepancy is minimized when the crops are bought at market price; and since the crops are not bought at market price the subsidy always ends up being greater than zero).
But the supply of food exceeds the demand. So the government is still left with more food than it can hope to sell. Rather than let the excess rot in grain silos, it has to come up with other ways to use it. Some of it becomes foreign aid sent to other countries. High fructose corn syrup is another byproduct of this food oversupply. As is ethanol to mix with gasoline. But a large portion of it becomes cheap grain to feed to cattle, since Americans love beef. This is food that was going to rot in grain silos if not used, so the money spent growing it and subsidizing it is a sunk cost and unrecoverable, and thus shouldn't be a factor in how you decide to use it. Any money you can recoup from selling it is a positive.
In other words, if the subsidies really did raise the price of a dollar hamburger to $6, ending subsidized meat production wouldn't mean we're saving $5. Since meat production is actually a money source to offset a sunk cost (selling grain that was going to otherwise rot), ending it would actually increase the cost of these food programs to the government. If the cattle industry wasn't buying all that excess grain, the government would have to pay the entire cost of subsidizing that overproduction. So the extra $5 in cost per hamburger would get distributed over all the grain and corn that's sold to supermarkets. And you'd see the price of grains and vegetables increase to pay for the subsidy that the meat industry is no longer paying to help offset.
(not seeing the slaughter also helps, I think if a few more kids saw an animal being killed it would make a big difference)
Actually in my experience it's the other way around. People who grow up insulated from the real world and get all their food in the supermarket develop a fantasy version of reality where all animals live in peace and harmony, until a big bad human comes and starts killing them.
Thereality is quitedifferent. The vast majority of animals are fated to be killed and eaten, usually while still alive. Outside of humans and the domesticated animals we protect, dying peacefully in your sleep of old age is extremely rare. People who hunt, fish, or grow up on a farm have had this shoved in their faces most of their lives. They know how the real world works, and have less qualms about killing animals for food. While non-religious vegetarians usually chose that lifestyle because they've been disconnected all their lives with how nature really works, and it comes as such a shock to them when they first find out that they can't bear the thought of participating in it.
If I were a wild animal, I would much rather be killed by a human than by other wild animals. People at least have enough empathy to try to make the kill as swiftly and painlessly as possible.
Great, except that's not how you evaluate a company's value. A company's value is based on where they're going, relative to the risk in them getting there and the timeframes involved. In the case of Tesla, they're in the middle of a scaleup that no "competitors" are even close to matching.
The "scaleup" is entirely artificial, not market-driven. EVs are selling because California has mandated that a certain percentage of each automakers' sales are zero emissions vehicles. The target is about 2.5% for 2018, ramping up to 8% in 2025. There's no market basis for this; it's just CARB setting an arbitrary number. Every automaker has to either comply, or buy enough credits to comply from an automaker which exceeds their quota, or be banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker being banned from selling cars to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
So every automaker, whether they believe in EVs or not, is busy producing EVs to comply. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the target, they run sales and incentives to make the market want enough (that's the scaleup you're seeing). Musk set up Tesla to take advantage of this, because he realized an automaker which produced only EVs would always exceed the quota, and thus could sell extra credits and make a profit, even if the vehicles were sold at-cost. Basically the system is rigged to force ICE sales to subsidize EV sales to hit an arbitrary production quota. That becomes harder to force as the percentage of ICE sales becomes smaller (profit margin on each ICE car has to be shifted to provide a bigger subsidy for EVs).
I don't short stocks because I think shorting is stupid. The most you can gain is the price of the stock at the time you shorted it; while the amount you can lose is infinite. It's the opposite risk/reward scenario of buying a stock. But it's quite obviously the Tesla fans who are buying into a fantasy here with Tesla's current valuation. Yes Tesla might eventually be worth that much. But they're still two orders of magnitude in production away from reaching that level. (Tesla is valued about the same as GM, and GM produces about 8000 cars per day vs Tesla's current production of about 6000 per month. Production being key here since you later cite investment in production as justification for lack of profit - clearly Tesla still needs a lot more investment in production if it wants to justify its stock valuation.) A *lot* can happen before Tesla's production capacity reaches that of GM's, so you're taking an enormous risk betting that it's going to be Tesla which finishes up on top of the EV race (or if EVs even represent the finish line, since it's CARB setting the goalposts, not the market)..
It's the same situation with Amazon. Stupid Amazon bears looked at past revenues relative to spending. Smart Amazon bears looked at future revenue potential, but just didn't believe they'd get there. Amazon bulls looked at future revenue potential, and did believe they'd get there. Amazon got there, the bulls profited, and both the stupid and smart bears lost. But at least the smart bears had a plausible argument.
Amazon is a great example. Amazon pre-dated the dot-com bubble. They were one of hundreds of dot com companies which were overhyped and overvalued. The people who bought into Amazon (IPO in 1997) weren't prescient that Amazon was going to come out on top. They just got stupid lucky betting on Amazon instead of the hundreds of other companies which crashed and burned when the dot com bubble burst. For every "faithful" Amazon investor who was "smart" and picked a winner, there were hundreds of "faithful" investors who were just as "smart" and picked
This is why net neutrality isn't the solution. Even if the net neutrality legislation we dream of became the law of the land, most ISPs would still have a monopoly, and you'll still be paying monopoly pricing for Internet access.
The real solution is to introduce competition into the ISP marketplace. Prohibit local governments from awarding monopoly service contracts to cable and telephone companies. Set it up like gas and electricity, where a single company is awarded the monopoly of building and maintaining the lines, but is prohibited from selling anything that's transported over those lines. Instead, you buy your gas or electricity from one of hundreds of providers, who each pay the maintenance company the same service fee to transport your gas or electricity over those lines. This wouldn't have worked 30 years ago when we didn't know what was the best way to lay out a cable network, and we needed different companies trying differing things so we could figure out which worked best. But that problem has pretty much been licked - all the cable companies now use the same DOCSIS equipment and transmit video using the same QAM encoding.
Competition fixes net neutrality too, since any ISP which deliberately throttles Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay them will be shooting themselves in the foot as their customers flee to an ISP which doesn't throttle Netflix. The only reason ISPs are able to blackmail Netflix into paying them is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to their monopoly.
It's the same reason people buy ICE cars when an EV is more than capable of fulfilling their daily commute needs. Every once in a while, you want to take a trip with your car which will exceed the EV's capabilities. And you don't want to maintain two cars to be able to handle both use cases. (I've advocated people rent for the occasional long trip, but because we don't teach people basic financial management in school, they think renting costs "extra" money while using a car you already own is "free." It's not free - the extra mileage depreciates the car and advances the maintenance schedule a little more. So you end up paying to use your car on the trip by having to pay for extra maintenance, and via a lower resale value when you sell the car.)
If you occasionally need to take your computer on trips (whether for work or play), then doing everything on a laptop can often be less of a hassle than having to maintain file consistency between two computers. And as others have pointed out, computers have gotten fast enough that a laptop is more than sufficient for 95% of tasks. In fact if you look at software trends over the last 15-20 years, you see an increasing emphasis on aesthetics and beautification (bubbly icons, transparency, animations, etc). Computers have gotten so fast the software authors can "waste" CPU cycles on trivial "neat-o" features like that without impacting performance.
Also, FWIW, I do all my direct computing on a laptop, but I also have a home server where I've set up virtual machines for grunt work like video encoding. I access the VMs via remote desktop from my laptop, so it's like I'm using the server with all its capabilities and power, but with the portability of the laptop (no wires, can use it while lounging on the sofa or in the backyard). My router has a VPN server so I can even access the server from anywhere in the world as long as I have Internet access.
Glass recycling is more about preventing broken glass bottles from littering the streets and parks. The deposit on most bottles (paid when you buy the beverage, refunded when you return the bottle at a recycler) encourages people to dispose of the bottles properly, instead of just chuck them out the car window. And even if you do chuck them out the window, some homeless person will probably clean them up for the deposit. Glass is just sand that's been melted, and is one of the more innocuous things you can put into a landfill (doesn't degrade into other nasty chemicals). So it winding up in landfills instead of being recycled isn't really a problem.
Likewise, paper buried in landfills is sequestered carbon. The tree pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere, used energy from sunlight to break off the O2, and locked up the Carbon in the form of cellulose. We chopped the tree down and turned that cellulose into paper. Burying the paper represents putting the carbon back underground, the reverse of what we do when we dig up and burn fossil fuels. In theory the paper could eventually biodegrade (converting the C back into CO2). But core samples drilled into landfills have come up with bits of newspaper over a century old, indicating not much biodegrading goes on. So burying paper in a landfill instead of recycling it isn't a problem either. (You don't really save trees by recycling paper - it's in the logger's best interest to re-plant any tree they chop down, so they'll have another tree to chop down in 20-40 years. So in developed countries, the number of trees remains fairly constant.)
Metals usually cost enough to refine that it's worth recycling them.
It's the plastics that are the problem. When I asked my garbage hauling service how they sort plastics, they claimed they hired inmates at below-minimum wage to do it for them.
This is a common error in reasoning I see, typically among animal rights advocates. Concentrating on the number of deaths, rather than the effect of the deaths. From the standpoint of survival of the species, the fate of an individual bird does not matter. The only thing that matters is if the number of birds killed is sustainable. That is, is the overall population declining? Or is it remaining steady or increasing? As long as the overall population is not declining, it does not matter if hundreds of millions of individual birds are killed. The take is sustainable, and the species is not at risk.
Mathematically, it's the first derivative of the species' population which is most important from a conservation standpoint. To a second order, the current population compared to historical population levels can be considered, although that gets clouded by things like changes in the environment and amount of available habitat as compared to decades ago. Unless the population is extremely low (like only in the hundreds), the fate of any individual member of the species is fairly irrelevant to the goal of preserving the species.
So the number you should be most concerned with is the rate at which the species' population is declining, not the number of individuals killed. You see, nearly every animal in the wild is killed. Dying of old age is something only commonly experienced by humans and the domesticated animals we protect. The vast majority of wild animals live short lives before they're snuffed out in an often gruesome death caused by another animal. Whether that animal happens to be a human using his hands, or a wild animal using claws and teeth is irrelevant (other than how it improves the sustainability of that animal's population)..
Expedited shipping means your packages may not be as consolidated as they could be, leading to more cars and trucks required to deliver them, and an increase in packaging waste, which researchers have found is adding more congestion to our cities, pollutants to our air, and cardboard to our landfills
This is a classic misunderstanding of opportunity cost. Comparing the scenarios as if the alternative is for the packages to materialize in your house via a Star Trek-style transporter and zero pollution.
If Amazon weren't shipping the items to you, you would probably drive to a local store to buy it. Multiple stores if you're buying a variety of things. In the vast majority of cases, that will burn more fuel and cause more pollution than delivery via UPS. The average UPS driver makes about 120 deliveries a day, driving about 150 miles. So total vehicle-miles per package is only about 1.25 miles. (The longer cross-state transport would've happened anyway delivering the item you bought to your local store.)
The excess packaging part I agree with. I peeves me that when Amazon is running promotions like their "$1 digital credit for slower shipping", it's per order rather than per item, or per $x spent. It encourages me to save my items for later, and purchase them one at a time, rather than put them all in one order which can be shipped in a single box. To their credit, I've found that if I place multiple orders in rapid succession, they're smart enough to consolidate all of them into a single shipment.
Because all it does is change the choice to "Do I eject the drive properly, or do I check to make sure "quick removal" is enabled and then yank the drive?" Unless you already know it's been set (i.e. you personally set it previously for this drive for this instance), the latter takes more time than ejecting.
The #1 cause I've seen for corruption of data/partition information on USB flash and external HDDs is yanking it out too quickly, just before the copy has finished. In theory a journaling filesystem like NTFS should be immune to damage from this. But for some reason it occasionally seems to corrupt the partition table making the entire contents of the drive inaccessible unless you're skilled enough to repair it manually (usual cause seems to be the partition type number got changed).
That's a 10 minute or so repair process if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it's probably 30-60 minutes downloading the tools and stumbling around trying to figure it out. And if you obeyed Windows when it popped up the "You need to format this disk before you can use it" message when you plugged the drive in again, and formatted it, now you're looking at several hours for file recovery with no guarantee you'll be able to recover everything. (They really need to add a second line to that message saying that formatting will destroy any existing data.)
All this risk and time wasted just to save a few seconds by not ejecting. So I advise people to always eject the drive before yanking it. The seatbelt analogy is very appropriate. It takes very little time to do, but the rare consequences if you don't do it can be devastating.
If he was monetizing his streams, then he needs to get model releases signed by everyone appearing in his streams. Otherwise he's violating the personality rights (right to control how one's image is used) of the passengers. Even if he didn't make money, publishing and distributing video with the intent to spread it far and wide (i.e. not just for your cousin Billy to view) typically requires model releases. If he doesn't have signed releases, these people can sue him for a piece of anything he gained, which arguably could be extended to income he made from Uber/Lyft.
It's the same reason why reality TV shows blur out the faces of people in the background (they couldn't chase them down to get model releases signed). News reporting usually gets a waiver because freedom of the press supersedes personality rights if broadcasting the image is necessary or incidental to coverage of a newsworthy event.
In other words, he's deeply and truly screwed. Doubly so since that he's admitted he's deleting the videos - that now constitutes destruction of evidence. (Evidence victims could use to validate that their rights were violated, and that he owes them damages.)
It's a unit of temperature based on putting the common range of temperatures people encounter in everyday life on a 0-100 scale, with sufficient granularity that the temperature adjustment knob in your car can go in increments of 1, instead of 0.5 like Celsius is forced to do.
I'm all for metric, but I IMHO the SI folks seriously screwed up when they set 100 C as the boiling point of water. They turned it into a temperature scale more suitable for cooking and high-temperature physics, than for regular people's everyday lives. The scale would've been much more user-friendly if they'd set the boiling point of water as 200 C.
TFA is the Los Angeles Times, so doubtless they converted the number to Fahrenheit for their readers. The original paper probably gives it in Celsius, but is paywalled so I can't confirm.
If you can find an international reference news article about a researcher in UC San Diego which retains the number in Celsius, you should submit that as an alternative source article. Otherwise, you must be new here if you're expecting the editors to convert Imperial to Metric in story submissions.
Pass law requiring bots to identify themselves as bots.
Vast majority of bots are reprogrammed to comply.
Since law is 99% effective, people start to believe that bots always identify themselves as bots.
Illicit bots take advantage of this, and claim to be human to bypass people's suspicions that they're interacting with a bot.
Profit!
(Brownie points: Program a fallback routine which passes control over to a human if the bot detects the person is repeatedly questioning if it's a bot.)
Basically it's the difference between a Turing test where the human participants know the entity they're interacting with could be a human or a bot, vs when the human participants assume the other entity is a human. Things which would seem suspiciously bot-like in the former case, get dismissed as simply being an odd personality quirk in the latter case.
This one's caused by poor management, not capitalism. Heathrowe's management set the condition for keeping a slot as 80% utilization by flights. If they want to maximize airport utilization, the metric they should be using is average number of passengers per slot pair.
Each airline should bid a number of passengers they think they can fly during that slot pair (paying a set amount per each passenger they bid). If an airline's actual number of passengers drops below 80% the next highest bid, then the slot should be reassigned to the next highest bidder.
Likely, the manager who set this 80% flight utilization policy was more interested in filling all the slot pairs to create the impression that the airport was busy, rather than maximizing revenue. i.e. He was acting as a regulator (and a poor one at that), rather than as a capitalist.
I am as cynical as they come but how is this a failed experiment if you lose nothing but have happier employees?
Because you can make employees happier and more productive just by doing something different. The novelty of being part of an experiment to try something different seems to be the cause of the benefits, not necessarily the change itself.
This is the reason double-blind studies exist. The control group isn't a group just left alone. It's a group which mimics participating in the experiment, but nothing is really done to them. (Though admittedly it'd be difficult to design a double-blind control for a 4-day workweek.)
A 15x20 pixel image of the Apollo lander (about 9 meters wide) would require an image resolution of 0.5 meters.
arctan( 0.5 meters / 384.4 million meters ) = 0.00000000013 radians, or 0.00027 arc-seconds
The Rayleigh criterion then tells us that to resolve something that small using blue light (shortest wavelength) would require telescope optics that are:
You might be able to do it with an interferometer. This is done all the time with radio telescopes - each dish acts as a single point on a very large mirror aimed at the same spot in the sky. But an interferometer needs to be aligned within a quarter wavelength of the light you're using. Relatively easy with radio waves, not so much with visible light.
Anyhow, this is all a moot point. The Apollo missions left retroreflectors on the landing sites. These are mirror arrays which will reflect light back exactly 180 degrees. Scientists use them all the time to precisely measure the distance to the moon, thus proving that we've actually been there.
Next up, the nut lobby will successfully lobby to ban the use of the term "peanut" because peanuts aren't nuts. And you'll be left calling it legume paste.
The Macbooks have been thermal limited for close to a decade now for one simple reason: Apple refuses to cut ventilation grilles into the bottom of the laptop because it would mar their precious aesthetics. This is why the 15" MBP has always relied on special CPUs (28W TDP versions instead of the regular 45W TDP version) and can only handle a low-to-mid grade GPU. And why Apple ditched the GPU in the 13" version and went with a souped-up version of Intel integrated graphics.
I mean I get how they could be marginally useful for navigating in tight quarters like crowded parking lots. But when on the road, all I can think of is this video.
Google required manufacturers to pre-install the Google search and browser apps on Android phones, otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to use Google Play (its app service).
True, but that has nothing to do with Android. Google releases the suite of Google apps (Maps, YouTube, search, etc) and the Play store as a suite and only as a suite. You install them all, or you install none of them. If you choose not to install them, you can set up your own store or use one of the many alternative stores (like Amazon's), or download the app from the Play store website and convert it to an apk to side-load directly onto your device. Unlike a certain other mobile ecosystem which begins with 'i'.
This is about as stupid an argument as claiming that Microsoft is reinforcing its Windows monopoly because it no longer sells Word and Excel separately.
Google paid manufacturers and network operators to make sure that only the Google search app was installed on devices.
True, but pretty much every search engine has done this. As long as users aren't prevented from choosing a different default search engine, it's not a problem.
Google has restricted the development of competing mobile phone operating systems, which could have provided a platform for rival search engines.
False. Google open sourced Android, thereby facilitating the development of competing mobile phone operating systems. Any vendor who wants to roll their own mobile OS no longer has to put in thousands of man-hours writing their own OS. They simply have to fork Android and build their own flavor. Like Amazon, OnePlus, and Barnes and Noble have done.
Google has used Android as a vehicle to cement its dominance as a search engine.
Probably true. And probably the entire reason the EU is upset at Google about this.
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of controversy in foreign relations simply means that nothing is happening - the status quo is being maintained. Which is great if you're happy with the status quo. But the majority of the world still lives under repressive regimes. So I'd classify maintaining the status quo as a foreign relations failure; a path chosen by a leader who was too afraid to take risks to try to change the world for the better.
I'm scared to death of how Trump is handling foreign relations. But I readily admit he's shaking things up, and the world will not be the same when he leaves office. Whether it's better or worse remains to be seen. But the Cold War didn't end because we maintained the status quo. Those of you who weren't alive at the time probably don't realize how much flak Reagan caught for "provoking" the Soviets by calling it an evil empire. Likewise, Korea has remained divided for nearly 70 years because we sought to maintain the status quo there. At some point you have to trust that on average things done by free democracies make the world better. So shaking things up on average yields better results than maintaining the status quo. Just like investing in stocks on average yields better returns than putting your money in a savings account, on average it's better to roll the dice than to play it safe.
I'm OK with that, if we also make it a crime to falsely claim a violation of your copyright when clearly no such violation exists. If some copyright association entity gets your YouTube video pulled because their automated algorithm mistakes the cadence of birds singing in the background for a copyrighted song, someone at that association has to go to jail.
Mirrorless only benefits wide-angle lenses. Specifically, lenses with a focal length shorter than the distance from the lens mount to the sensor (that is what focal length literally is - distance from the lens to the plane it's focusing on). In a SLR, the traveling mirror meant the rear-most lens element had to be further than a certain minimum distance from the sensor. To produce focal lengths shorter than that (wide-angle lenses) required a retrofocus lens design. Basically two lenses on top of each other. One is the real wide-angle lens that you want. A second is a lens to take the light from that wide-angle lens and shift its image so it emanates from a virtual lens which sits in the mirror's path. The second lens is the reason for the higher cost (and larger size) of wide-angle lenses for SLRs.
With a mirrorless camera, you no longer need a retrofocus design. You can simply take the wide-angle lens and mount it at its focal length from the sensor. Mirrorless makes no difference to normal and telephoto lenses, and thus offers no benefits at those focal lengths (other than smaller body size). And in fact the focus range for some existing SLR lenses may not work with the smaller distance between the mount and sensor of a mirrorless body. You'll either need a spacing adapter to place it at its SLR mount distance, or the lens' focus mechanism will need to be redesigned.
The market is controlled because of the foot shortages we experienced after the Dust Bowl which exacerbated the Great Depression. That's when the government realized, holy crap it's really possible for a modern developed country to not produce enough food to feed itself. Consequently, we enacted all sorts of subsidies to insure there's always an oversupply of food. It's why we pay farmers not to plant anything - so if another dust bowl should wipe out a large chunk of the country's farmland, we have plenty of reserve farmland ready and available to immediately go back into production.
The consequence of all these subsidies is overproduction. That leads to the market price dropping to unsustainable levels (farmers cannot sell their crops for enough to cover their expenses). That's where the other government subsidies come in. The government buys all these crops at a fixed price, thus allowing the farmers to stay in business. The government then acts as a monopoly source and resells the food at a higher price to distributors like supermarkets. That lets them recoup most of the subsidy (but not all - the discrepancy is minimized when the crops are bought at market price; and since the crops are not bought at market price the subsidy always ends up being greater than zero).
But the supply of food exceeds the demand. So the government is still left with more food than it can hope to sell. Rather than let the excess rot in grain silos, it has to come up with other ways to use it. Some of it becomes foreign aid sent to other countries. High fructose corn syrup is another byproduct of this food oversupply. As is ethanol to mix with gasoline. But a large portion of it becomes cheap grain to feed to cattle, since Americans love beef. This is food that was going to rot in grain silos if not used, so the money spent growing it and subsidizing it is a sunk cost and unrecoverable, and thus shouldn't be a factor in how you decide to use it. Any money you can recoup from selling it is a positive.
In other words, if the subsidies really did raise the price of a dollar hamburger to $6, ending subsidized meat production wouldn't mean we're saving $5. Since meat production is actually a money source to offset a sunk cost (selling grain that was going to otherwise rot), ending it would actually increase the cost of these food programs to the government. If the cattle industry wasn't buying all that excess grain, the government would have to pay the entire cost of subsidizing that overproduction. So the extra $5 in cost per hamburger would get distributed over all the grain and corn that's sold to supermarkets. And you'd see the price of grains and vegetables increase to pay for the subsidy that the meat industry is no longer paying to help offset.
Actually in my experience it's the other way around. People who grow up insulated from the real world and get all their food in the supermarket develop a fantasy version of reality where all animals live in peace and harmony, until a big bad human comes and starts killing them.
The reality is quite different. The vast majority of animals are fated to be killed and eaten, usually while still alive. Outside of humans and the domesticated animals we protect, dying peacefully in your sleep of old age is extremely rare. People who hunt, fish, or grow up on a farm have had this shoved in their faces most of their lives. They know how the real world works, and have less qualms about killing animals for food. While non-religious vegetarians usually chose that lifestyle because they've been disconnected all their lives with how nature really works, and it comes as such a shock to them when they first find out that they can't bear the thought of participating in it.
If I were a wild animal, I would much rather be killed by a human than by other wild animals. People at least have enough empathy to try to make the kill as swiftly and painlessly as possible.
The "scaleup" is entirely artificial, not market-driven. EVs are selling because California has mandated that a certain percentage of each automakers' sales are zero emissions vehicles. The target is about 2.5% for 2018, ramping up to 8% in 2025. There's no market basis for this; it's just CARB setting an arbitrary number. Every automaker has to either comply, or buy enough credits to comply from an automaker which exceeds their quota, or be banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, this would result in the automaker being banned from selling cars to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population.
So every automaker, whether they believe in EVs or not, is busy producing EVs to comply. And if the market doesn't want enough EVs to meet the target, they run sales and incentives to make the market want enough (that's the scaleup you're seeing). Musk set up Tesla to take advantage of this, because he realized an automaker which produced only EVs would always exceed the quota, and thus could sell extra credits and make a profit, even if the vehicles were sold at-cost. Basically the system is rigged to force ICE sales to subsidize EV sales to hit an arbitrary production quota. That becomes harder to force as the percentage of ICE sales becomes smaller (profit margin on each ICE car has to be shifted to provide a bigger subsidy for EVs).
I don't short stocks because I think shorting is stupid. The most you can gain is the price of the stock at the time you shorted it; while the amount you can lose is infinite. It's the opposite risk/reward scenario of buying a stock. But it's quite obviously the Tesla fans who are buying into a fantasy here with Tesla's current valuation. Yes Tesla might eventually be worth that much. But they're still two orders of magnitude in production away from reaching that level. (Tesla is valued about the same as GM, and GM produces about 8000 cars per day vs Tesla's current production of about 6000 per month. Production being key here since you later cite investment in production as justification for lack of profit - clearly Tesla still needs a lot more investment in production if it wants to justify its stock valuation.) A *lot* can happen before Tesla's production capacity reaches that of GM's, so you're taking an enormous risk betting that it's going to be Tesla which finishes up on top of the EV race (or if EVs even represent the finish line, since it's CARB setting the goalposts, not the market)..
Amazon is a great example. Amazon pre-dated the dot-com bubble. They were one of hundreds of dot com companies which were overhyped and overvalued. The people who bought into Amazon (IPO in 1997) weren't prescient that Amazon was going to come out on top. They just got stupid lucky betting on Amazon instead of the hundreds of other companies which crashed and burned when the dot com bubble burst. For every "faithful" Amazon investor who was "smart" and picked a winner, there were hundreds of "faithful" investors who were just as "smart" and picked
This is why net neutrality isn't the solution. Even if the net neutrality legislation we dream of became the law of the land, most ISPs would still have a monopoly, and you'll still be paying monopoly pricing for Internet access.
The real solution is to introduce competition into the ISP marketplace. Prohibit local governments from awarding monopoly service contracts to cable and telephone companies. Set it up like gas and electricity, where a single company is awarded the monopoly of building and maintaining the lines, but is prohibited from selling anything that's transported over those lines. Instead, you buy your gas or electricity from one of hundreds of providers, who each pay the maintenance company the same service fee to transport your gas or electricity over those lines. This wouldn't have worked 30 years ago when we didn't know what was the best way to lay out a cable network, and we needed different companies trying differing things so we could figure out which worked best. But that problem has pretty much been licked - all the cable companies now use the same DOCSIS equipment and transmit video using the same QAM encoding.
Competition fixes net neutrality too, since any ISP which deliberately throttles Netflix to try to get Netflix to pay them will be shooting themselves in the foot as their customers flee to an ISP which doesn't throttle Netflix. The only reason ISPs are able to blackmail Netflix into paying them is because they know their customers can't flee to a different ISP due to their monopoly.
It's the same reason people buy ICE cars when an EV is more than capable of fulfilling their daily commute needs. Every once in a while, you want to take a trip with your car which will exceed the EV's capabilities. And you don't want to maintain two cars to be able to handle both use cases. (I've advocated people rent for the occasional long trip, but because we don't teach people basic financial management in school, they think renting costs "extra" money while using a car you already own is "free." It's not free - the extra mileage depreciates the car and advances the maintenance schedule a little more. So you end up paying to use your car on the trip by having to pay for extra maintenance, and via a lower resale value when you sell the car.)
If you occasionally need to take your computer on trips (whether for work or play), then doing everything on a laptop can often be less of a hassle than having to maintain file consistency between two computers. And as others have pointed out, computers have gotten fast enough that a laptop is more than sufficient for 95% of tasks. In fact if you look at software trends over the last 15-20 years, you see an increasing emphasis on aesthetics and beautification (bubbly icons, transparency, animations, etc). Computers have gotten so fast the software authors can "waste" CPU cycles on trivial "neat-o" features like that without impacting performance.
Also, FWIW, I do all my direct computing on a laptop, but I also have a home server where I've set up virtual machines for grunt work like video encoding. I access the VMs via remote desktop from my laptop, so it's like I'm using the server with all its capabilities and power, but with the portability of the laptop (no wires, can use it while lounging on the sofa or in the backyard). My router has a VPN server so I can even access the server from anywhere in the world as long as I have Internet access.
Glass recycling is more about preventing broken glass bottles from littering the streets and parks. The deposit on most bottles (paid when you buy the beverage, refunded when you return the bottle at a recycler) encourages people to dispose of the bottles properly, instead of just chuck them out the car window. And even if you do chuck them out the window, some homeless person will probably clean them up for the deposit. Glass is just sand that's been melted, and is one of the more innocuous things you can put into a landfill (doesn't degrade into other nasty chemicals). So it winding up in landfills instead of being recycled isn't really a problem.
Likewise, paper buried in landfills is sequestered carbon. The tree pulled CO2 out of the atmosphere, used energy from sunlight to break off the O2, and locked up the Carbon in the form of cellulose. We chopped the tree down and turned that cellulose into paper. Burying the paper represents putting the carbon back underground, the reverse of what we do when we dig up and burn fossil fuels. In theory the paper could eventually biodegrade (converting the C back into CO2). But core samples drilled into landfills have come up with bits of newspaper over a century old, indicating not much biodegrading goes on. So burying paper in a landfill instead of recycling it isn't a problem either. (You don't really save trees by recycling paper - it's in the logger's best interest to re-plant any tree they chop down, so they'll have another tree to chop down in 20-40 years. So in developed countries, the number of trees remains fairly constant.)
Metals usually cost enough to refine that it's worth recycling them.
It's the plastics that are the problem. When I asked my garbage hauling service how they sort plastics, they claimed they hired inmates at below-minimum wage to do it for them.
This is a common error in reasoning I see, typically among animal rights advocates. Concentrating on the number of deaths, rather than the effect of the deaths. From the standpoint of survival of the species, the fate of an individual bird does not matter. The only thing that matters is if the number of birds killed is sustainable. That is, is the overall population declining? Or is it remaining steady or increasing? As long as the overall population is not declining, it does not matter if hundreds of millions of individual birds are killed. The take is sustainable, and the species is not at risk.
Mathematically, it's the first derivative of the species' population which is most important from a conservation standpoint. To a second order, the current population compared to historical population levels can be considered, although that gets clouded by things like changes in the environment and amount of available habitat as compared to decades ago. Unless the population is extremely low (like only in the hundreds), the fate of any individual member of the species is fairly irrelevant to the goal of preserving the species.
So the number you should be most concerned with is the rate at which the species' population is declining, not the number of individuals killed. You see, nearly every animal in the wild is killed. Dying of old age is something only commonly experienced by humans and the domesticated animals we protect. The vast majority of wild animals live short lives before they're snuffed out in an often gruesome death caused by another animal. Whether that animal happens to be a human using his hands, or a wild animal using claws and teeth is irrelevant (other than how it improves the sustainability of that animal's population)..
This is a classic misunderstanding of opportunity cost. Comparing the scenarios as if the alternative is for the packages to materialize in your house via a Star Trek-style transporter and zero pollution.
If Amazon weren't shipping the items to you, you would probably drive to a local store to buy it. Multiple stores if you're buying a variety of things. In the vast majority of cases, that will burn more fuel and cause more pollution than delivery via UPS. The average UPS driver makes about 120 deliveries a day, driving about 150 miles. So total vehicle-miles per package is only about 1.25 miles. (The longer cross-state transport would've happened anyway delivering the item you bought to your local store.)
The excess packaging part I agree with. I peeves me that when Amazon is running promotions like their "$1 digital credit for slower shipping", it's per order rather than per item, or per $x spent. It encourages me to save my items for later, and purchase them one at a time, rather than put them all in one order which can be shipped in a single box. To their credit, I've found that if I place multiple orders in rapid succession, they're smart enough to consolidate all of them into a single shipment.
Because all it does is change the choice to "Do I eject the drive properly, or do I check to make sure "quick removal" is enabled and then yank the drive?" Unless you already know it's been set (i.e. you personally set it previously for this drive for this instance), the latter takes more time than ejecting.
The #1 cause I've seen for corruption of data/partition information on USB flash and external HDDs is yanking it out too quickly, just before the copy has finished. In theory a journaling filesystem like NTFS should be immune to damage from this. But for some reason it occasionally seems to corrupt the partition table making the entire contents of the drive inaccessible unless you're skilled enough to repair it manually (usual cause seems to be the partition type number got changed).
That's a 10 minute or so repair process if you know what you're doing. If you don't, it's probably 30-60 minutes downloading the tools and stumbling around trying to figure it out. And if you obeyed Windows when it popped up the "You need to format this disk before you can use it" message when you plugged the drive in again, and formatted it, now you're looking at several hours for file recovery with no guarantee you'll be able to recover everything. (They really need to add a second line to that message saying that formatting will destroy any existing data.)
All this risk and time wasted just to save a few seconds by not ejecting. So I advise people to always eject the drive before yanking it. The seatbelt analogy is very appropriate. It takes very little time to do, but the rare consequences if you don't do it can be devastating.
If he was monetizing his streams, then he needs to get model releases signed by everyone appearing in his streams. Otherwise he's violating the personality rights (right to control how one's image is used) of the passengers. Even if he didn't make money, publishing and distributing video with the intent to spread it far and wide (i.e. not just for your cousin Billy to view) typically requires model releases. If he doesn't have signed releases, these people can sue him for a piece of anything he gained, which arguably could be extended to income he made from Uber/Lyft.
It's the same reason why reality TV shows blur out the faces of people in the background (they couldn't chase them down to get model releases signed). News reporting usually gets a waiver because freedom of the press supersedes personality rights if broadcasting the image is necessary or incidental to coverage of a newsworthy event.
In other words, he's deeply and truly screwed. Doubly so since that he's admitted he's deleting the videos - that now constitutes destruction of evidence. (Evidence victims could use to validate that their rights were violated, and that he owes them damages.)
It's a unit of temperature based on putting the common range of temperatures people encounter in everyday life on a 0-100 scale, with sufficient granularity that the temperature adjustment knob in your car can go in increments of 1, instead of 0.5 like Celsius is forced to do.
I'm all for metric, but I IMHO the SI folks seriously screwed up when they set 100 C as the boiling point of water. They turned it into a temperature scale more suitable for cooking and high-temperature physics, than for regular people's everyday lives. The scale would've been much more user-friendly if they'd set the boiling point of water as 200 C.
TFA is the Los Angeles Times, so doubtless they converted the number to Fahrenheit for their readers. The original paper probably gives it in Celsius, but is paywalled so I can't confirm.
If you can find an international reference news article about a researcher in UC San Diego which retains the number in Celsius, you should submit that as an alternative source article. Otherwise, you must be new here if you're expecting the editors to convert Imperial to Metric in story submissions.
Basically it's the difference between a Turing test where the human participants know the entity they're interacting with could be a human or a bot, vs when the human participants assume the other entity is a human. Things which would seem suspiciously bot-like in the former case, get dismissed as simply being an odd personality quirk in the latter case.
This one's caused by poor management, not capitalism. Heathrowe's management set the condition for keeping a slot as 80% utilization by flights. If they want to maximize airport utilization, the metric they should be using is average number of passengers per slot pair.
Each airline should bid a number of passengers they think they can fly during that slot pair (paying a set amount per each passenger they bid). If an airline's actual number of passengers drops below 80% the next highest bid, then the slot should be reassigned to the next highest bidder.
Likely, the manager who set this 80% flight utilization policy was more interested in filling all the slot pairs to create the impression that the airport was busy, rather than maximizing revenue. i.e. He was acting as a regulator (and a poor one at that), rather than as a capitalist.
They wouldn't be so easily confused if the DuckDuckGo landing page didn't look nearly identical to Google's landing page. Contrast to Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Startpage, Qwant, Yandex (#1 in Russia), Naver (#1 in South Korea). The only other major search engine which makes the same mistake of copying Google too closely is Baidu (#1 in China).
Because you can make employees happier and more productive just by doing something different. The novelty of being part of an experiment to try something different seems to be the cause of the benefits, not necessarily the change itself.
This is the reason double-blind studies exist. The control group isn't a group just left alone. It's a group which mimics participating in the experiment, but nothing is really done to them. (Though admittedly it'd be difficult to design a double-blind control for a 4-day workweek.)
The Rayleigh criterion then tells us that to resolve something that small using blue light (shortest wavelength) would require telescope optics that are:
You might be able to do it with an interferometer. This is done all the time with radio telescopes - each dish acts as a single point on a very large mirror aimed at the same spot in the sky. But an interferometer needs to be aligned within a quarter wavelength of the light you're using. Relatively easy with radio waves, not so much with visible light.
Anyhow, this is all a moot point. The Apollo missions left retroreflectors on the landing sites. These are mirror arrays which will reflect light back exactly 180 degrees. Scientists use them all the time to precisely measure the distance to the moon, thus proving that we've actually been there.
OP is wrong. "Milk" can also refer to the fluid found in the kernels of many grains and nuts as they ripen, like in kernels of corn.
Next up, the nut lobby will successfully lobby to ban the use of the term "peanut" because peanuts aren't nuts. And you'll be left calling it legume paste.
The Macbooks have been thermal limited for close to a decade now for one simple reason: Apple refuses to cut ventilation grilles into the bottom of the laptop because it would mar their precious aesthetics. This is why the 15" MBP has always relied on special CPUs (28W TDP versions instead of the regular 45W TDP version) and can only handle a low-to-mid grade GPU. And why Apple ditched the GPU in the 13" version and went with a souped-up version of Intel integrated graphics.
I mean I get how they could be marginally useful for navigating in tight quarters like crowded parking lots. But when on the road, all I can think of is this video.
True, but that has nothing to do with Android. Google releases the suite of Google apps (Maps, YouTube, search, etc) and the Play store as a suite and only as a suite. You install them all, or you install none of them. If you choose not to install them, you can set up your own store or use one of the many alternative stores (like Amazon's), or download the app from the Play store website and convert it to an apk to side-load directly onto your device. Unlike a certain other mobile ecosystem which begins with 'i'.
This is about as stupid an argument as claiming that Microsoft is reinforcing its Windows monopoly because it no longer sells Word and Excel separately.
True, but pretty much every search engine has done this. As long as users aren't prevented from choosing a different default search engine, it's not a problem.
False. Google open sourced Android, thereby facilitating the development of competing mobile phone operating systems. Any vendor who wants to roll their own mobile OS no longer has to put in thousands of man-hours writing their own OS. They simply have to fork Android and build their own flavor. Like Amazon, OnePlus, and Barnes and Noble have done.
Probably true. And probably the entire reason the EU is upset at Google about this.