I help people buy computers (for home and business), and frequently get asked what's the best laptop. I have to explain that there's a "best laptop" for me, and a "best laptop" for you, and a "best laptop" for George in your book club. But they will be three different laptops. i.e The "best" of anything depends on the individual asking.
In that respect I can agree that nobody should be advertising that they're the unconditional "best" at something. But the NAD laying out their own criteria for determining what's "best" is just as asinine as T-Mobile advertising that they're "best." The criteria which will determine the "best" cellular service provider varies with each individual.
CR doesn't accept manufacturer-provided samples for testing. They pose as a buyer and buy the product just as a regular customer would. This includes cars. So the car they test in their review is a true random sample. If Tesla is getting 133 ft stopping distances in their internal testing, while CR got a 152 ft stopping distance, that would suggest a QA problem at Tesla is resulting in large variability in the effectiveness of the brakes. Which given all the problems they've had with their Model 3 production wouldn't be that surprising.
With the exception of Switzerland (which is buoyed by a strong presence in the lucrative banking sector), all of those countries also have lower GDP per capita than the U.S. That is, on average, each of their citizens produce less. And since everything that's consumed must be produced, this translates directly into standard of living.
This isn't an issue with a clear-cut right or wrong answer. Increasing average productivity per citizen (at the end of the freedom scale most first world nations are at) results in lower income equality between citizens. And likewise increasing equality between citizens decreases average productivity per citizen. Both of these traits (high productivity per citizen, and income equality between citizens) are desirable, but there's no obvious optimal balance point between them. Some countries opt for higher average productivity, some opt for more equality. Neither are "right"; they are just different.
IMHO, the entire problem starts with viewing this as there being only two sides, and that your only options are to take or leave the offer the other side makes. Unionizing isn't the only way to fight an obstinate employer. You can always start your own business. I did that and couldn't be happier about leaving behind all the inanity of dealing with a clueless employer. (Though to be fair, it's also given me insight into why a lot of employer behavior I originally thought was clueless actually wasn't.)
I also find it highly ironic that the people most likely to advocate unions (employees gathering together to fight a repressive employer) are also most likely to be in favor of lax immigration policies (siphoning off citizens who would otherwise gather together to fight a repressive government). If your attitude towards immigration is that it's better to allow those people to leave the repressive country for a better one, shouldn't that also be your attitude towards employers? Employees of a bad company should be encouraged to leave for other jobs or start their own companies.
if Prime video services worked on my non Fire android box.
Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is. They insist that streaming video services be encrypted in one of two ways.
As a software player on a general purpose computing device (i.e. a PC). In this case, Hollywood requires the video stream decryption happen inside an encrypted virtual machine so you don't simply save a copy of the decrypted video before it's sent to your video card. That's why Amazon, Netflix, Hulu in a browser requires Flash or Silverlight.
As a dedicated hardware device. Amazon, Netflix, Smart TV makers, blu-ray player makers, etc. have to submit one of these devices running their service to Hollywood, who then approves it or denies it based on how secure they deem the hardware video decryption to be. If your Android box is custom or doesn't have a large market share, Amazon may not know it needs to submit it to Hollywood for approval. Prime Video works fine on my Nexus smartphone and Galaxy tablet.
If Hollywood didn't have a stick up their collective asses, you could simply download and install a generic Android Prime Video app and run it on any Android device. But because of Hollywood, Amazon (and Netflix, Hulu, etc) have to put code in their players to detect your device, and if it's not on the Hollywood-authorized list, bomb out.
(and Prime didn't increase in price 10-20% every year)
Prime was $79 when it was introduced in 2005. It just increased to $119 in 2018.
That's a 119/79 = 1.50 = 50% increase in 13 years. Or 1.5^(1/13) = 1.032 = 3.2% per year.
For reference, $79 in 2005 adjusted for inflation passed $99 in 2017. And Amazon announced the price increase the next year. So the price of Prime has been exactly keeping pace with inflation, except Amazon has added a ton of features to it since it was first introduced.
Not that I think Amber Alerts are a good idea. But I would assume if you got one from a city an 8 hour drive away, that means abduction took place more than 8 hours ago. And authorities were issuing the alert to all locations where the suspect could've driven in the intervening time. It's not like you instantly know a child has been abducted. There's some time where you figure the child is out playing with friends, then some more time for frantic phone calls and searching when the child doesn't show up for a meal, then more time to decide if this is serious enough to call police, then time to explain to and convince police that an abduction has taken place, then time for police to gather evidence and confirm that a certain person (and thus a vehicle license plate) may be responsible.
The infrequency of Amber Alerts probably has more to do with how rare child abductions are, than it has to do with them being issued to a small localized area.
The problem is that car accidents are in general vastly under-reported by the media. Until the last couple years, the single most dangerous thing you did was to get into a car (surpassed only recently by drug overdoses). On average, about 1 in 102 people you know are fated to die in a car accident. Compare to the odds of some of the other things the media devotes a disproportionately high (or low) amount of coverage time:
Suicide: 1 in 91
Police killed on duty: 1 in 104 (1.1 million officers / (135 per year * 78 year lifespan normalization)
Homicide by gun: 1 in 285
Drowning: 1 in 1,086
Fire: 1 in 1,506
Choking: 1 in 3,138
Killed by police: 1 in 4,336 (325.7 million / (963 * 78 year lifespan)
Complications from pregnancy: 1 in 5,965 (325.7 million / (700 * 78 year normalization)
Terrorism in U.S.: 1 in 28,033 (325.7 million / (3277 * 78 year lifespan / 22 years sample))
Killed by deer: 1 in 34,797 (325.7 million / (120 * 78 year lifespan)
Gun accident: 1 in 8305
Lightning: 1 in 114,195
School shootings: 1 in 121,033 (325.7 million / (138 * 78 year lifespan normalization / 4 years sample))
Dog attack: 1 in 132,614
Plane crash: 1 in 205,552
Terrorism in U.S. excluding 9/11: 1 in 248,954
Shark attack: 1 in 3,690,101 (325.7 million / (43 * 78 year lifespan / 38 year sample)
If news reports were truly unbiased, you'd expect to see:
Roughly 3x as many reports about fatal car accidents than gun homicides.
5x as many reports of women dying from pregnancy than reports of terrorism fatalities (including 9/11, 77x without).
39x as many stories about people dying of choking on food, versus school shootings.
43x as many stories about fatal car accidents than police shootings.
91x as many reports about suicides than gun accidents.
Over 100x as many stories about people being killed by deer, than killed by sharks.
The truth is the media picks and chooses which stories they want to publicize, whether it be because of their unusual and provocative nature (e.g. Tesla crashes, plane crashes, school shootings, shark attacks), or to serve a political agenda.
The problem isn't data collection per se. It's retention. If you want to put your entire life history on Facebook, it's not a problem as long as Facebook will delete it all if you change your mind and decide you no longer wish to share it with them. Facebook refuses to do that, and will hang on to your old data (apparently forever), which makes them by far the worst transgressor. (They used to also make it near-impossible to get a copy of all your data, in case you wanted to leave but didn't want to lose everything. But apparently they've addressed that recently.)
I read TFA a few days ago when it first came out. What's notably lacking is that this isn't a way to delete your data from Apple's servers. Just a way for you to request a copy.
No retroactive extensions. Copyright for already-existing works stays at whatever the copyright term was when the work was created. Any extension only applies to works newly created after the extension is put into effect.
The purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." You can only promote something which has yet to be created; you cannot promote something which has already been created. So retroactively extending copyright terms serves no Constitutional purpose.
This eliminates extending copyright duration for personal gain, and limits arguments about whether or not to extend it within the scope of encouraging new works, not profiteering off of existing works.
Your matching 401k (where your employer matches what you put into it) is a pre-funded pension. The full amount of the company's obligation leaves the company's control as soon as you've fulfilled the obligation (worked for a month). If the company goes bankrupt, it doesn't affect your 401k, unlike what nearly happened to GM. When they were in danger of going bankrupt, all their pensioners were in danger of losing their pension. Which would've ended up turning them into bottom-priority creditors who would likely only collect pennies per dollar they were owed. That can't happen with a wholly pre-funded pension where the pension is spun off into a separate entity.
The USPS pension pre-funding requirement was created to prevent the situation California is in. For decades, the state and local government underfunded pension obligations, instead relying on overly optimistic projections of future returns on fund investment to create the illusion that the pensions were adequately funded. As the decades of underfunding built up, the delta between the actual funding and the illusory projected funding grew more and more, until eventually it became impossible to pretend the amount of money in the funds would be enough the pay for all the promised pensions. This has resulted in the paradoxical situation where taxes and tax revenue are going up, but the budget has to be cut - because the extra money is going into paying up those underfunded pensions. Basically, all the money they spent on other things besides pensions in the past, they're having to pay back into the pensions now (past generations stole from the current generation).
The USPS pension pre-funding requirement is basically "if you promise you'll pay someone in the future, put aside enough money now to pay for it." That the requirement has been onerous to the USPS is just an indication that the pension had been underfunded for the past decades. If they'd been keeping up with their pension funding instead of relying on wildly optimistic fund growth estimates to make it look like it was adequately funded, then the USPS wouldn't have had to pay any more than they already were. In other words, if the requirement wasn't hurting the USPS, then that would be evidence that the requirement wasn't needed. But the fact that it is hurting the USPS is evidence that the requirement was needed to halt financial mismanagement before it ballooned into an even bigger problem in the future.
The human manager had more information than the computer program did. If the computer program had the same information (and programmed rules) then it would make the same decision.
I've highlighted the key point you're missing. The program needs a human to program it (tell it what to do). A human is able to reason out the situation and come up with the rule on his own. "If the competition drops prices, I need to drop prices too if I want to keep my customers. If the competition raises prices, it's safe for me to raise prices." AI can't do that yet.
If you fed the AI enough data, it might randomly stumble upon this pattern and develop an algorithm where its pricing follows pricing in other stores. But the pricing in other stores is itself based on decisions made by humans. So if you made all store pricing based on the AI, it'd end up spinning its wheels. Kinda like the flash stock crashes that happen when a stock price hits some pre-programmed sell level, resulting in some computers ordering the stock be sold, which drops the price more, causing more computers to order the stock be sold, etc. Until some human figures out what's going on, and starts buying up massive quantities of erroneously under-priced stock.
Humans can start from a blank slate and, based on the context of their education and life experiences, come up with quasi-reasonable starting rules for pretty much any situation. Then refine those rules over repeated trials. The best AI can do right now is trial and error. It's this application of context step where AI is lacking. Same reason computers have difficulty parsing simple sentences like "He fed her cat food." Did he feed the woman's cat? Or did he force her to eat food made for cats?
In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.
And you'd be wrong. Birth rate and income are inversely correlated within the same age group (that is, after controlling for older people tending to have higher incomes). You'll also note that fertility rate (birthrate divided by number of women aged 15-44) is higher in lower income races like black and hispanic. The opposite of what you'd expect if the factors you listed were the cause.
The difference is probably due to ease of access to contraception. Wealthier people have better access to more effective (long-term) contraception. But its cost has come down and the taboo against it has mostly disappeared, so even poorer and younger people have more access to it.
VNC and Remote Desktop encode the desktop as graphics elements, and transmits that to the client for display. It does fine when the display is simple (which is why they disable the desktop picture on low bandwidth connections). But if the display starts to become cluttered or complex (like video), it begins to slow down.
Steam Link and other streaming apps like Splashtop take a totally different approach. They use the GPU's h.264 encoder to convert the desktop into a video, and simply stream that to the client. The disadvantage is that the output doesn't exactly match the desktop - you start to get pixelation if the image becomes complex or there's rapid motion. The advantage is that it's much faster at complex images like video and game output, and because the client just sees a h.264 video stream you can use practically any modern device to display it (nearly everything has a h.264 decoder built into it).
A good analogy would be VNC and Remote Desktop are like GIF and PNG. Steam Link is like JPEG. If you want the remote desktop to perfectly mirror the original, then PNG/VNC are the way to go. But if a slightly inaccurate reproduction (with pixelation and colors slightly the wrong shae) is acceptable, then JPEG/Steam Link is much better.
The warnings are due to Proposition 65 - a citizen's ballot initiative which passed in 1986. It mandates a ridiculously low non-scientific threshold for requiring a cancer warning - a 1 in 100,000 chance of getting cancer due to exposure. By comparison, your lifetime odds of being killed by car is 1 in 114. By a pool is 1 in 5772. By falling from a ladder is 1 in 7707. By dog attack is 1 in 112,400. By lightning is 1 in 161,856. So we're talking about cancer risk levels which are minuscule compared to other risks you face during your lifetime.
But that's the threshold Prop 65 requires. So practically everything ends up requiring a Prop 65 warning label, including silly things like coffee. The judge can disagree with it, but has to comply with it because the text of the law is very specific. I've often joked that every door leading outside should have a Prop 65 warning above it because sunlight is known to cause cancer (about 1 in 43 people will get skin cancer in their lifetime).
About the only purpose Prop 65 serves is to enrich lawyers who go around finding businesses without the warning sing, and suing them for non-compliance, then settling the lawsuit for a few thousand dollars. The usual victim is an immigrant small business owner who never would've dreamed that such a silly law exists.
Where the taxes come from is irrelevant. If you eliminated all income taxes and converted them into corporate taxes, people wouldn't suddenly be able to buy more stuff. Corporations would be forced to increase prices, and reduce wages and dividends to compensate for the new taxes. The net result being that although prices would be different, the purchasing power of an employee would be exactly the same.
Regardless of whether 100% of taxes are income taxes, or 100% of taxes are corporate taxes, the only thing that matters is the total productivity of the citizens. Money isn't even the ultimate measure. It's an inaccurate surrogate measure of productivity, whose value can fluctuate depending on the availability of the currency. Productivity is what matters because everything which is consumed has to be produced. For you to buy a big screen TV, someone has to produce a big screen TV. For you to get health care, someone has to produce the doctors and medicines you're getting. The average standard of living for a country is simply the total productivity of the country divided by the number of citizens. If the country can produce lots of food, clothes, houses, cars, electronics, etc., then the country's standard of living is high. If the country can barely produce enough food to feed itself, then its standard of living is low.
Taxes redirect part of a citizen's productivity out of the citizen's control, and into the government's control. If the government can use that redirected productivity to something more useful than the citizen would've spent it on (e.g. health care instead of a big screen TV), then the tax benefits society by increasing its total productivity. If the government wastes it on non-productive or counter-productive endeavors than the citizen would've spent it on (e.g. construction projects for mafia-controlled construction companies), then the tax harms society by decreasing its total productivity. The source of the tax is irrelevant*; the only thing that matters is what percentage of the productivity of the country's citizens is controlled by the government, and what percentage by the citizens.
* An exception would be taxes intended to modify behavior. e.g. fuel taxes (discourage driving) or property taxes (encourage finding a productive use for real estate or selling it to someone who will). Those can alter productivity by altering behavior, before the government gets its hands on the money.
Your suggestion to tax where the costs are (e.g. fuel taxes to pay for roads) seems to make intuitive sense. But it ultimately loses out due to wasteful complexity. Taxing everything which incurs a cost means having a gazillion taxes, which means a massive amount of duplicated effort tracking, calculating, collecting, and disbursing tax revenue. Due to economies of scale, the most efficient taxation scheme ends up being a single tax, thereby minimizing the amount of productivity lost to the overhead of tracking, calculating, collecting, and disbursing taxes. And if you believe in progressive taxation (richer people pay more), then the single tax which makes the most sense is an income tax.
Traditional currency has a financial incentive to reduce transaction costs. If the transaction costs are too high, people will simply stop using the currency. They will instead use a different currency or resort to bartering to reduce their costs. Over the centuries, this has driven the per-transaction cost down to cents or fractions of a cent.
A dollar bill costs about 5 cents to make. and will last a bit more than 5 years (older bills would last less than 2 years). Higher denominations are about 10 cents to make (more anti-counterfeiting measures). If you average them across all denominations, it works out to about 1.5 cents per $1. So the cost of producing the bill amortized per transaction is on the order of hundredths or thousandths of a cent.
A store owner carrying a bag of the store's receipts for the day to the bank, if he's carrying say $1000 in revenue to a bank 2.5 miles away, that's 5 miles at a IRS-estimated vehicle cost rate of 55 cents/mile, or $2.75 for the round trip. And the cost to carry the bag to the bank is then 0.275 cents per dollar. If that revenue is from 50 transactions ($20 per transaction), that works out to a cost of 5.5 cents per transaction. (I'm deliberately erring on the high side to favor bitcoin. Most businesses I know choose a bank which is much closer. And $1000 revenue per day is about as low as a small business gets.)
How does bitcoin compare?
Production energy costs are very close to the value of the bitcoin generated. So call it 80 cents per dollar. Nearly two orders of magnitude higher than paper currency.
Bitcoin deliberately imposes a high energy cost in each transaction. So high that many online stores have stopped accepting bitcoin because the costs have reached several dollars per transaction.
Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.
While I'm with you on the obstruction charge, it is the job of the accuser to prove guilt, not the job of the accused to prove innocence. It's impossible to prove a negative, so it's often difficult or impossible to prove one's innocence, since that would require you to prove you didn't do anything wrong. The only way one can prove innocence is to account for one's actions at every moment of every day. Since that's practically impossible, the burden of proof must be on the accuser, not the accused. And people presumed innocent until proven guilty.
Trying to generate negative publicity by blowing lots of smoke is what accusers tend to do when they can't find any evidence of a fire.
And yet another angle is that Trump and his sons have explicitly stated they've borrowed large amounts from Russian banks, which could potentially give them significant leverage over our President on one end
How would that give the banks leverage? The borrower has leverage over the lender, not the other way around - the borrower has the lender's stuff. If you get a mortgage from the bank, the bank has to hope you pay them back, and won't skip town. The only leverage the bank has is their power provided by the country's law to repossess your home. No such power exists in an international loan - the bank is relying on the borrower's creditworthiness and desire to freely travel to the bank's country again in the future. When I was in grad school, I met several international students who'd racked up significant amounts of credit card debt, who weren't planning to repay but were simply going to leave the country forever after they graduated. The borrower holds all the cards in international loans.
They usually load the car down with weight (far over the vehicle's weight rating) to increase traction. When VW pulled a 747 with a Touareg, they doubled the tire pressure and loaded it with something like 4 tons of cement bags. There's a large amount of tolerance built into cars for dynamic loads (e.g. increase in forces the tires and suspension feels when you hit a pothole). So if you've got a slow, steady course which generates only static loads, you can pull some pretty impressive things with them.
You actually don't want too much torque. I was aboard a flight which was delayed when the bar those tugs use to push the plane broke. We had to wait about 20 minutes while they inspected the landing gear to make sure it wasn't damaged, retrieved a new bar from storage, and attached it. The captain chatted with us over the intercom to help pass the time, and mentioned that that bar alone cost nearly $200,000 due to how expensive things are in the aerospace industry (designed, manufactured, and tested to exact tolerances with very few being made).
And they can only because your local government granted them a monopoly. The cable companies aren't natural monopolies. Your local government gave them the power they enjoy to screw you over.
When I lived in the outskirts of Boston, my city voted to allow a second cable company to provide service. The day before the competing service became available to customers, the original cable company dropped the prices for all their Internet plans by $10/mo, implemented a 50% speed increase across the board at no charge, eliminated all installation and service change fees, and switched from requiring a multi-year subscription to month-to-month after just 6 months.
You don't need to wait for net neutrality legislation or court decisions, which could take decades, if it ever happens at all. All you need is to convince your local city council to vote to introduce competition, by allowing a second (or even third) cable company to provide service. They created this mess, they can fix it.
You don't need morality to justify banning gambling. You can make an entirely economic argument for the ban. Normal economic transactions are win-win for both parties - positive sum. The seller gets paid more than the item or service cost them to acquire, the buyer gets something they value more than how much they paid for it. It's this positive sum nature of beneficial transactions which causes economic growth.
Likewise, criminal activities are negative sum. A burglar gains the value of the loot he stole, the homeowner loses the value of the loot plus extraneous damage to the home. Hence burglaries are negative sum and criminalized in the interest of fostering economic productivity (encourage the burglar to pick a different activity which is productive, instead of weighing down the economy by burglarizing).
Gambling is zero sum. What one person gets, another person must lose. You could even argue it's negative sum due to inefficiencies (some of the money is spent on consumables like betting slips, travel to gambling venues, etc., while no productivity is generated). So on a strictly monetary level, gambling is bad for the economy. That said, it can have beneficial qualities due to its entertainment value. Entertainment is monetarily negative sum (due to loss of consumables), but the enjoyment and relaxation it provides can encourage people to be more productive later when they're working. If the encouragement value exceeds the cost of consumables, then entertainment ends up being net positive sum for the economy.
I don't know if the entertainment value of gambling (and sports for that matter) offsets the economic losses. But it can be judged without bringing morality into it.
He's actually donating plasma, not blood. The Australian Red Cross allows you to donate plasma every 2-3 weeks. Which falls right in line with 1100 donations in 3128 weeks.
Blood donations are limited to once every 12 weeks in Australia. The American Red Cross limits blood donations to every 8 weeks. Plasma (and platelet) donations to every 7 days, up to 24 times a year (once every 2.2 weeks).
The stupid thing is he's probably going to face a harsher punishment than the people responsible for the Equifax leak. All he did was try to change his grades. Equifax put over a hundred million people's credit and finances at risk.
Though I have to say, if he'd put as much effort into studying as he did setting up this phishing attempt (create a website which mimics the official school site?), he probably wouldn't have needed to change his grades.
The 4th Amendment does not provide any exceptions to its rules.
The SCotUS has consistently ruled that the U.S. Constitution only applies to U.S. soil. That's why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo. The Marine base there is on Cuban soil, leased since 1903. Any prisoners sent there would technically not be on U.S. soil, and thus not gain U.S. Constitutional rights. (A later SCotUS decision ruled that although it wasn't U.S. soil, the U.S. had administrative authority over it making it essentially the same as U.S. soil, granting the prisoners there Constitutional rights.)
So no, if you're trying to enter the U.S. at a border, you're not protected by the 4th Amendment. The answer is muddied a bit by air travel, but some leeway is given for deplaning passengers who have not yet passed through immigration. Some extremists at CBP have interpreted this exception to the extreme to come up with the infamous "Constitution does not apply within 100 miles of an International airport" quote, but given the history behind the SCotUS precendents that interpretation would be highly unlikely to stand up in court.
Also, the argument you're trying to make (applying the U.S. Constitution outside U.S. territory) is extremely dangerous. If you say the 4th Amendment protects people outside the U.S., you set a precedent whereby other U.S. laws can also be applied to people outside the U.S. And that is a can of worms we're trying to prevent from being opened. It sounds like a great idea when your country does it. But if you consider what happens if every country on Earth does it, you realize just how terrible a concept it is.
The bigger problem in Los Angeles is tar. The ground in the region was once the top oil producing field in California. Most of the oil has been pumped out, but the tar remains. The La Brea Tar Pits are the most visible example.
When Los Angeles first planned an underground subway system in the 1980s, the cost estimate was $400 million. Soon after they began digging, they had to stop because workers would go home for the night, and return the next day to find the newly-dug tunnel walls were covered in tar which had seeped through overnight. The tar made a mess of their equipment and prevented laying down uniform concrete walls. The project was put on hold for years as they worked on designing a way to hold back the tar as they dug. By the time they finally got a process figured out, the additional time, design, and equipment had ballooned the cost to nearly $2 billion - then the most expensive public works project in history (later surpassed by the Big Dig in Boston).
Slashdot Mirror
I help people buy computers (for home and business), and frequently get asked what's the best laptop. I have to explain that there's a "best laptop" for me, and a "best laptop" for you, and a "best laptop" for George in your book club. But they will be three different laptops. i.e The "best" of anything depends on the individual asking.
In that respect I can agree that nobody should be advertising that they're the unconditional "best" at something. But the NAD laying out their own criteria for determining what's "best" is just as asinine as T-Mobile advertising that they're "best." The criteria which will determine the "best" cellular service provider varies with each individual.
CR doesn't accept manufacturer-provided samples for testing. They pose as a buyer and buy the product just as a regular customer would. This includes cars. So the car they test in their review is a true random sample. If Tesla is getting 133 ft stopping distances in their internal testing, while CR got a 152 ft stopping distance, that would suggest a QA problem at Tesla is resulting in large variability in the effectiveness of the brakes. Which given all the problems they've had with their Model 3 production wouldn't be that surprising.
With the exception of Switzerland (which is buoyed by a strong presence in the lucrative banking sector), all of those countries also have lower GDP per capita than the U.S. That is, on average, each of their citizens produce less. And since everything that's consumed must be produced, this translates directly into standard of living.
This isn't an issue with a clear-cut right or wrong answer. Increasing average productivity per citizen (at the end of the freedom scale most first world nations are at) results in lower income equality between citizens. And likewise increasing equality between citizens decreases average productivity per citizen. Both of these traits (high productivity per citizen, and income equality between citizens) are desirable, but there's no obvious optimal balance point between them. Some countries opt for higher average productivity, some opt for more equality. Neither are "right"; they are just different.
IMHO, the entire problem starts with viewing this as there being only two sides, and that your only options are to take or leave the offer the other side makes. Unionizing isn't the only way to fight an obstinate employer. You can always start your own business. I did that and couldn't be happier about leaving behind all the inanity of dealing with a clueless employer. (Though to be fair, it's also given me insight into why a lot of employer behavior I originally thought was clueless actually wasn't.)
I also find it highly ironic that the people most likely to advocate unions (employees gathering together to fight a repressive employer) are also most likely to be in favor of lax immigration policies (siphoning off citizens who would otherwise gather together to fight a repressive government). If your attitude towards immigration is that it's better to allow those people to leave the repressive country for a better one, shouldn't that also be your attitude towards employers? Employees of a bad company should be encouraged to leave for other jobs or start their own companies.
Amazon isn't in control of that. Hollywood is. They insist that streaming video services be encrypted in one of two ways.
If Hollywood didn't have a stick up their collective asses, you could simply download and install a generic Android Prime Video app and run it on any Android device. But because of Hollywood, Amazon (and Netflix, Hulu, etc) have to put code in their players to detect your device, and if it's not on the Hollywood-authorized list, bomb out.
Prime was $79 when it was introduced in 2005. It just increased to $119 in 2018.
That's a 119/79 = 1.50 = 50% increase in 13 years. Or 1.5^(1/13) = 1.032 = 3.2% per year.
For reference, $79 in 2005 adjusted for inflation passed $99 in 2017. And Amazon announced the price increase the next year. So the price of Prime has been exactly keeping pace with inflation, except Amazon has added a ton of features to it since it was first introduced.
Not that I think Amber Alerts are a good idea. But I would assume if you got one from a city an 8 hour drive away, that means abduction took place more than 8 hours ago. And authorities were issuing the alert to all locations where the suspect could've driven in the intervening time. It's not like you instantly know a child has been abducted. There's some time where you figure the child is out playing with friends, then some more time for frantic phone calls and searching when the child doesn't show up for a meal, then more time to decide if this is serious enough to call police, then time to explain to and convince police that an abduction has taken place, then time for police to gather evidence and confirm that a certain person (and thus a vehicle license plate) may be responsible.
The infrequency of Amber Alerts probably has more to do with how rare child abductions are, than it has to do with them being issued to a small localized area.
The problem is that car accidents are in general vastly under-reported by the media. Until the last couple years, the single most dangerous thing you did was to get into a car (surpassed only recently by drug overdoses). On average, about 1 in 102 people you know are fated to die in a car accident. Compare to the odds of some of the other things the media devotes a disproportionately high (or low) amount of coverage time:
Suicide: 1 in 91
Police killed on duty: 1 in 104 (1.1 million officers / (135 per year * 78 year lifespan normalization)
Homicide by gun: 1 in 285
Drowning: 1 in 1,086
Fire: 1 in 1,506
Choking: 1 in 3,138
Killed by police: 1 in 4,336 (325.7 million / (963 * 78 year lifespan)
Complications from pregnancy: 1 in 5,965 (325.7 million / (700 * 78 year normalization)
Terrorism in U.S.: 1 in 28,033 (325.7 million / (3277 * 78 year lifespan / 22 years sample))
Killed by deer: 1 in 34,797 (325.7 million / (120 * 78 year lifespan)
Gun accident: 1 in 8305
Lightning: 1 in 114,195
School shootings: 1 in 121,033 (325.7 million / (138 * 78 year lifespan normalization / 4 years sample))
Dog attack: 1 in 132,614
Plane crash: 1 in 205,552
Terrorism in U.S. excluding 9/11: 1 in 248,954
Shark attack: 1 in 3,690,101 (325.7 million / (43 * 78 year lifespan / 38 year sample)
If news reports were truly unbiased, you'd expect to see:
Roughly 3x as many reports about fatal car accidents than gun homicides.
5x as many reports of women dying from pregnancy than reports of terrorism fatalities (including 9/11, 77x without).
39x as many stories about people dying of choking on food, versus school shootings.
43x as many stories about fatal car accidents than police shootings.
91x as many reports about suicides than gun accidents.
Over 100x as many stories about people being killed by deer, than killed by sharks.
The truth is the media picks and chooses which stories they want to publicize, whether it be because of their unusual and provocative nature (e.g. Tesla crashes, plane crashes, school shootings, shark attacks), or to serve a political agenda.
The problem isn't data collection per se. It's retention. If you want to put your entire life history on Facebook, it's not a problem as long as Facebook will delete it all if you change your mind and decide you no longer wish to share it with them. Facebook refuses to do that, and will hang on to your old data (apparently forever), which makes them by far the worst transgressor. (They used to also make it near-impossible to get a copy of all your data, in case you wanted to leave but didn't want to lose everything. But apparently they've addressed that recently.)
Google at least makes it easy for you to get a copy of your data should you wish to leave or change services, and to delete data they've collected on you from their servers.
I read TFA a few days ago when it first came out. What's notably lacking is that this isn't a way to delete your data from Apple's servers. Just a way for you to request a copy.
No retroactive extensions. Copyright for already-existing works stays at whatever the copyright term was when the work was created. Any extension only applies to works newly created after the extension is put into effect.
The purpose of copyright is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." You can only promote something which has yet to be created; you cannot promote something which has already been created. So retroactively extending copyright terms serves no Constitutional purpose.
This eliminates extending copyright duration for personal gain, and limits arguments about whether or not to extend it within the scope of encouraging new works, not profiteering off of existing works.
Your matching 401k (where your employer matches what you put into it) is a pre-funded pension. The full amount of the company's obligation leaves the company's control as soon as you've fulfilled the obligation (worked for a month). If the company goes bankrupt, it doesn't affect your 401k, unlike what nearly happened to GM. When they were in danger of going bankrupt, all their pensioners were in danger of losing their pension. Which would've ended up turning them into bottom-priority creditors who would likely only collect pennies per dollar they were owed. That can't happen with a wholly pre-funded pension where the pension is spun off into a separate entity.
The USPS pension pre-funding requirement was created to prevent the situation California is in. For decades, the state and local government underfunded pension obligations, instead relying on overly optimistic projections of future returns on fund investment to create the illusion that the pensions were adequately funded. As the decades of underfunding built up, the delta between the actual funding and the illusory projected funding grew more and more, until eventually it became impossible to pretend the amount of money in the funds would be enough the pay for all the promised pensions. This has resulted in the paradoxical situation where taxes and tax revenue are going up, but the budget has to be cut - because the extra money is going into paying up those underfunded pensions. Basically, all the money they spent on other things besides pensions in the past, they're having to pay back into the pensions now (past generations stole from the current generation).
The USPS pension pre-funding requirement is basically "if you promise you'll pay someone in the future, put aside enough money now to pay for it." That the requirement has been onerous to the USPS is just an indication that the pension had been underfunded for the past decades. If they'd been keeping up with their pension funding instead of relying on wildly optimistic fund growth estimates to make it look like it was adequately funded, then the USPS wouldn't have had to pay any more than they already were. In other words, if the requirement wasn't hurting the USPS, then that would be evidence that the requirement wasn't needed. But the fact that it is hurting the USPS is evidence that the requirement was needed to halt financial mismanagement before it ballooned into an even bigger problem in the future.
I've highlighted the key point you're missing. The program needs a human to program it (tell it what to do). A human is able to reason out the situation and come up with the rule on his own. "If the competition drops prices, I need to drop prices too if I want to keep my customers. If the competition raises prices, it's safe for me to raise prices." AI can't do that yet.
If you fed the AI enough data, it might randomly stumble upon this pattern and develop an algorithm where its pricing follows pricing in other stores. But the pricing in other stores is itself based on decisions made by humans. So if you made all store pricing based on the AI, it'd end up spinning its wheels. Kinda like the flash stock crashes that happen when a stock price hits some pre-programmed sell level, resulting in some computers ordering the stock be sold, which drops the price more, causing more computers to order the stock be sold, etc. Until some human figures out what's going on, and starts buying up massive quantities of erroneously under-priced stock.
Humans can start from a blank slate and, based on the context of their education and life experiences, come up with quasi-reasonable starting rules for pretty much any situation. Then refine those rules over repeated trials. The best AI can do right now is trial and error. It's this application of context step where AI is lacking. Same reason computers have difficulty parsing simple sentences like "He fed her cat food." Did he feed the woman's cat? Or did he force her to eat food made for cats?
And you'd be wrong. Birth rate and income are inversely correlated within the same age group (that is, after controlling for older people tending to have higher incomes). You'll also note that fertility rate (birthrate divided by number of women aged 15-44) is higher in lower income races like black and hispanic. The opposite of what you'd expect if the factors you listed were the cause.
The difference is probably due to ease of access to contraception. Wealthier people have better access to more effective (long-term) contraception. But its cost has come down and the taboo against it has mostly disappeared, so even poorer and younger people have more access to it.
VNC and Remote Desktop encode the desktop as graphics elements, and transmits that to the client for display. It does fine when the display is simple (which is why they disable the desktop picture on low bandwidth connections). But if the display starts to become cluttered or complex (like video), it begins to slow down.
Steam Link and other streaming apps like Splashtop take a totally different approach. They use the GPU's h.264 encoder to convert the desktop into a video, and simply stream that to the client. The disadvantage is that the output doesn't exactly match the desktop - you start to get pixelation if the image becomes complex or there's rapid motion. The advantage is that it's much faster at complex images like video and game output, and because the client just sees a h.264 video stream you can use practically any modern device to display it (nearly everything has a h.264 decoder built into it).
A good analogy would be VNC and Remote Desktop are like GIF and PNG. Steam Link is like JPEG. If you want the remote desktop to perfectly mirror the original, then PNG/VNC are the way to go. But if a slightly inaccurate reproduction (with pixelation and colors slightly the wrong shae) is acceptable, then JPEG/Steam Link is much better.
The warnings are due to Proposition 65 - a citizen's ballot initiative which passed in 1986. It mandates a ridiculously low non-scientific threshold for requiring a cancer warning - a 1 in 100,000 chance of getting cancer due to exposure. By comparison, your lifetime odds of being killed by car is 1 in 114. By a pool is 1 in 5772. By falling from a ladder is 1 in 7707. By dog attack is 1 in 112,400. By lightning is 1 in 161,856. So we're talking about cancer risk levels which are minuscule compared to other risks you face during your lifetime.
But that's the threshold Prop 65 requires. So practically everything ends up requiring a Prop 65 warning label, including silly things like coffee. The judge can disagree with it, but has to comply with it because the text of the law is very specific. I've often joked that every door leading outside should have a Prop 65 warning above it because sunlight is known to cause cancer (about 1 in 43 people will get skin cancer in their lifetime).
About the only purpose Prop 65 serves is to enrich lawyers who go around finding businesses without the warning sing, and suing them for non-compliance, then settling the lawsuit for a few thousand dollars. The usual victim is an immigrant small business owner who never would've dreamed that such a silly law exists.
Where the taxes come from is irrelevant. If you eliminated all income taxes and converted them into corporate taxes, people wouldn't suddenly be able to buy more stuff. Corporations would be forced to increase prices, and reduce wages and dividends to compensate for the new taxes. The net result being that although prices would be different, the purchasing power of an employee would be exactly the same.
Regardless of whether 100% of taxes are income taxes, or 100% of taxes are corporate taxes, the only thing that matters is the total productivity of the citizens. Money isn't even the ultimate measure. It's an inaccurate surrogate measure of productivity, whose value can fluctuate depending on the availability of the currency. Productivity is what matters because everything which is consumed has to be produced. For you to buy a big screen TV, someone has to produce a big screen TV. For you to get health care, someone has to produce the doctors and medicines you're getting. The average standard of living for a country is simply the total productivity of the country divided by the number of citizens. If the country can produce lots of food, clothes, houses, cars, electronics, etc., then the country's standard of living is high. If the country can barely produce enough food to feed itself, then its standard of living is low.
Taxes redirect part of a citizen's productivity out of the citizen's control, and into the government's control. If the government can use that redirected productivity to something more useful than the citizen would've spent it on (e.g. health care instead of a big screen TV), then the tax benefits society by increasing its total productivity. If the government wastes it on non-productive or counter-productive endeavors than the citizen would've spent it on (e.g. construction projects for mafia-controlled construction companies), then the tax harms society by decreasing its total productivity. The source of the tax is irrelevant*; the only thing that matters is what percentage of the productivity of the country's citizens is controlled by the government, and what percentage by the citizens.
* An exception would be taxes intended to modify behavior. e.g. fuel taxes (discourage driving) or property taxes (encourage finding a productive use for real estate or selling it to someone who will). Those can alter productivity by altering behavior, before the government gets its hands on the money.
Your suggestion to tax where the costs are (e.g. fuel taxes to pay for roads) seems to make intuitive sense. But it ultimately loses out due to wasteful complexity. Taxing everything which incurs a cost means having a gazillion taxes, which means a massive amount of duplicated effort tracking, calculating, collecting, and disbursing tax revenue. Due to economies of scale, the most efficient taxation scheme ends up being a single tax, thereby minimizing the amount of productivity lost to the overhead of tracking, calculating, collecting, and disbursing taxes. And if you believe in progressive taxation (richer people pay more), then the single tax which makes the most sense is an income tax.
How does bitcoin compare?
Basically, bitcoin's problem is that it replaced gold's natural scarcity with artificial scarcity produced by imposing a high energy cost to generation and transaction. Consequently, its production and transaction costs are roughly two orders of magnitude higher than traditional currencies. Mathematically, it (blockchain) is a brilliant concept. But it's obvious its developers had little practical knowledge of both monetary economics and day-to-day business economics.
Trying to generate negative publicity by blowing lots of smoke is what accusers tend to do when they can't find any evidence of a fire.
How would that give the banks leverage? The borrower has leverage over the lender, not the other way around - the borrower has the lender's stuff. If you get a mortgage from the bank, the bank has to hope you pay them back, and won't skip town. The only leverage the bank has is their power provided by the country's law to repossess your home. No such power exists in an international loan - the bank is relying on the borrower's creditworthiness and desire to freely travel to the bank's country again in the future. When I was in grad school, I met several international students who'd racked up significant amounts of credit card debt, who weren't planning to repay but were simply going to leave the country forever after they graduated. The borrower holds all the cards in international loans.
They usually load the car down with weight (far over the vehicle's weight rating) to increase traction. When VW pulled a 747 with a Touareg, they doubled the tire pressure and loaded it with something like 4 tons of cement bags. There's a large amount of tolerance built into cars for dynamic loads (e.g. increase in forces the tires and suspension feels when you hit a pothole). So if you've got a slow, steady course which generates only static loads, you can pull some pretty impressive things with them.
You actually don't want too much torque. I was aboard a flight which was delayed when the bar those tugs use to push the plane broke. We had to wait about 20 minutes while they inspected the landing gear to make sure it wasn't damaged, retrieved a new bar from storage, and attached it. The captain chatted with us over the intercom to help pass the time, and mentioned that that bar alone cost nearly $200,000 due to how expensive things are in the aerospace industry (designed, manufactured, and tested to exact tolerances with very few being made).
And they can only because your local government granted them a monopoly. The cable companies aren't natural monopolies. Your local government gave them the power they enjoy to screw you over.
When I lived in the outskirts of Boston, my city voted to allow a second cable company to provide service. The day before the competing service became available to customers, the original cable company dropped the prices for all their Internet plans by $10/mo, implemented a 50% speed increase across the board at no charge, eliminated all installation and service change fees, and switched from requiring a multi-year subscription to month-to-month after just 6 months.
You don't need to wait for net neutrality legislation or court decisions, which could take decades, if it ever happens at all. All you need is to convince your local city council to vote to introduce competition, by allowing a second (or even third) cable company to provide service. They created this mess, they can fix it.
You don't need morality to justify banning gambling. You can make an entirely economic argument for the ban. Normal economic transactions are win-win for both parties - positive sum. The seller gets paid more than the item or service cost them to acquire, the buyer gets something they value more than how much they paid for it. It's this positive sum nature of beneficial transactions which causes economic growth.
Likewise, criminal activities are negative sum. A burglar gains the value of the loot he stole, the homeowner loses the value of the loot plus extraneous damage to the home. Hence burglaries are negative sum and criminalized in the interest of fostering economic productivity (encourage the burglar to pick a different activity which is productive, instead of weighing down the economy by burglarizing).
Gambling is zero sum. What one person gets, another person must lose. You could even argue it's negative sum due to inefficiencies (some of the money is spent on consumables like betting slips, travel to gambling venues, etc., while no productivity is generated). So on a strictly monetary level, gambling is bad for the economy. That said, it can have beneficial qualities due to its entertainment value. Entertainment is monetarily negative sum (due to loss of consumables), but the enjoyment and relaxation it provides can encourage people to be more productive later when they're working. If the encouragement value exceeds the cost of consumables, then entertainment ends up being net positive sum for the economy.
I don't know if the entertainment value of gambling (and sports for that matter) offsets the economic losses. But it can be judged without bringing morality into it.
He's actually donating plasma, not blood. The Australian Red Cross allows you to donate plasma every 2-3 weeks. Which falls right in line with 1100 donations in 3128 weeks.
Blood donations are limited to once every 12 weeks in Australia. The American Red Cross limits blood donations to every 8 weeks. Plasma (and platelet) donations to every 7 days, up to 24 times a year (once every 2.2 weeks).
The stupid thing is he's probably going to face a harsher punishment than the people responsible for the Equifax leak. All he did was try to change his grades. Equifax put over a hundred million people's credit and finances at risk.
Though I have to say, if he'd put as much effort into studying as he did setting up this phishing attempt (create a website which mimics the official school site?), he probably wouldn't have needed to change his grades.
The SCotUS has consistently ruled that the U.S. Constitution only applies to U.S. soil. That's why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo. The Marine base there is on Cuban soil, leased since 1903. Any prisoners sent there would technically not be on U.S. soil, and thus not gain U.S. Constitutional rights. (A later SCotUS decision ruled that although it wasn't U.S. soil, the U.S. had administrative authority over it making it essentially the same as U.S. soil, granting the prisoners there Constitutional rights.)
So no, if you're trying to enter the U.S. at a border, you're not protected by the 4th Amendment. The answer is muddied a bit by air travel, but some leeway is given for deplaning passengers who have not yet passed through immigration. Some extremists at CBP have interpreted this exception to the extreme to come up with the infamous "Constitution does not apply within 100 miles of an International airport" quote, but given the history behind the SCotUS precendents that interpretation would be highly unlikely to stand up in court.
Also, the argument you're trying to make (applying the U.S. Constitution outside U.S. territory) is extremely dangerous. If you say the 4th Amendment protects people outside the U.S., you set a precedent whereby other U.S. laws can also be applied to people outside the U.S. And that is a can of worms we're trying to prevent from being opened. It sounds like a great idea when your country does it. But if you consider what happens if every country on Earth does it, you realize just how terrible a concept it is.
The bigger problem in Los Angeles is tar. The ground in the region was once the top oil producing field in California. Most of the oil has been pumped out, but the tar remains. The La Brea Tar Pits are the most visible example.
When Los Angeles first planned an underground subway system in the 1980s, the cost estimate was $400 million. Soon after they began digging, they had to stop because workers would go home for the night, and return the next day to find the newly-dug tunnel walls were covered in tar which had seeped through overnight. The tar made a mess of their equipment and prevented laying down uniform concrete walls. The project was put on hold for years as they worked on designing a way to hold back the tar as they dug. By the time they finally got a process figured out, the additional time, design, and equipment had ballooned the cost to nearly $2 billion - then the most expensive public works project in history (later surpassed by the Big Dig in Boston).