The primary reason of the guns, is that they were invented to kill more efficiently.
Actually, NATO standardized on the smaller 5.56 mm round because in testing they discovered it would tumble, imparting more energy to the flesh and causing larger woulds. The M1 Garand (standard issue U.S. rifle in WWII) used.30-'06 rounds (7.62mm) which were so powerful they would punch right through a person. Good for a kill shot, but it tended to be all-or-nothing. Either you killed the target, or you just created a straight hole which could be bandaged up.
The 5.56 mm rounds were better at creating injuries - lower kill rate but higher rate of incapacitating the target. And strategically it's better to wound enemy soldiers than to kill them. If you kill them, the enemy just ignores the bodies. If they're wounded, the enemy has to tie up resources recovering and evacuating the wounded, and additional resources for hospitalization and medical care.
So no, the primary purpose of guns is not to kill more efficiently. That's a fantasy concocted by people trying to think of the worst possible rationale for something they dislike. The purpose of guns is to intimidate - make people fear the consequences of noncompliance with the person holding the gun. That's why sometimes police with guns can defuse a situation without ever firing a shot. If you believe the killing theory, then such a resolution should be impossible because the gun was never fired and thus had no opportunity to kill anyone.
Intimidation is actually the main purpose of most weapons. Have you ever wondered why "decimate" is a synonym for utterly destroying, but it actually means killing just 1 in 10? Because killing isn't actually the purpose of weapons and war. It's intimidation. And killing 1 in 10 people in an opposing army was usually sufficient to cause the remaining 9 to rout and flee. Nukes are a good example - they worked to keep the U.S. from meddling with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, and vice versa, even though they were never used. Ukraine lacking them (they disarmed after assurances from the West that we'd protect them from invasion) is what allowed Russia to waltz in and grab Crimea.
Forget the BS about sport , that did not happen in the 18th century for your average person in the US, at the time of the framing of the second amendment.
Oh my. If you lived any reasonable distance outside of a city in the 18th century and didn't have a rifle, your family starved. It was the primary means of putting meat on the table. Part of the reason the U.S. won the Revolutionary War was because a significant fraction of the milita were sharpshooters skilled with using rifles (muskets with rifling to spin-stabilize the bullet increasing accuracy) for hunting. The British still followed the "line everyone up and fire a volley at once" strategy, which works great against an enemy doing the same thing back at you. Not so well against sharpshooters hiding in the woods picking you off one by one from a distance.
(And if you're curious, no I don't own a gun. I don't even like them, and have never shot one aside from a BB gun. I just took the time to educate myself about the issue before drawing conclusions.)
I've met a lot of native Chinese who, when the topic drifted to systems of government, insisted that they were OK with the Communist party's monopoly on power in China. That yeah it had a lot of downsides, but they were ushering in a lot of improvements too. I had a really hard time trying to convince them that those improvements probably would've happened even without the Party.
A move like eliminating term limits lays bare the truth about the motivations of the people in power. And will probably do more than any outsider ever could to convince the people that single-party control is wrong.
To quote the old Battlestar Galactica series: The opposite of war is not peace. The opposite of war is slavery. Democracy just tries to keep the fighting confined to verbal attacks in a legislative building. And a move like this could convince a lot of Chinese that they're living as slaves instead of at peace, spurring them to fight for their freedom.
While I agree the cost of an ambulance ride is ridiculous, the amount that's charged is actually in line with what it costs to operate one. Ambulances cost about a quarter million dollars to purchase and outfit. So right off the bat you're at 10x the cost of a private car used for taxi services. Then you have to pay for the labor costs of two, sometimes three EMTs aboard instead of a single driver. And you're amortizing all this over a lot fewer rides per day than a taxi service. So it actually makes sense that they cost several tens of times more than a taxi service.
Those of you in countries where national health care covers it are still paying the same amount. You're just paying it via everyone's taxes instead of it being billed to the person getting the ride.
Economic situations like this normally resolve themselves by dividing into different tiers of service. e.g. If you only need a ride, a cheaper, less outfitted ambulance (or Uber) can provide that service. However, medical emergencies where lives are at stake cause people to "play it safe" regardless of cost, resulting in patients always traveling in the fully outfitted maximum expense ambulance for even the most minor of injuries. As another example, I've got several thousands of dollars of safety and first aid equipment aboard my boat which will probably never be used. We're so far up the cost/benefit curve that the marginal price increase is huge for a tiny bit of extra benefit. There really isn't a good solution here (in terms of reducing overall cost to society) unless you're willing to accept an increased risk of someone who is being transported dying while en route.
When the drowsy passenger asked him if Boston's Mass General hospital was the nearest emergency room, "that set off a red flag," Fish told BuzzFeed News. "I said, 'Do you need the ER?' He said yes.
The first time a sick/injured person who does this dies or isn't treated in a timely manner sues Uber because an Uber driver didn't rush them to the hospital despite knowing they needed to visit the ER, Uber will institute a policy prohibiting drivers from asking passengers if they are sick/injured and need the ER.
That in turn will bite people who were fine when they got into the Uber car, but collapse / have a heart attack / have a stroke during the ride. The driver will then be prohibited from asking if they need assistance and will probably be required to assume they've just fallen asleep.
Actually, it's HR which come up with those inane lists of qualifications. They do it to reduce the stack of resumes they'll receive, so they won't have to work as hard to pick out a dozen candidates for interviews. The boss just wants someone who can do the job, and couldn't care less how many years experience you have if you can do the job.
Yeah, this case is basically the U.S. version of the German cases requiring search engines to strike Nazi results worldwide, and French cases requiring websites abroad to block content deemed illegal in France.
It's one of those situations where you only see the advantages if you consider only yourself (your country). But the disadvantages become obvious when you consider the world as a whole. e.g. "What if you could have sex with anyone who wanted?" Most people think that would be fantastic. "What if anyone could have sex with you?" Suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great idea.
The only decision which makes sense if you want to preserve the integrity of national borders is that U.S. law stops at the U.S. border, German law stops at the German border, French law stops at France's border. If the U.S. wants to get its hands on information Microsoft is storing in Ireland, they should file a request with Irish authorities (similar to an extradition request). Then Ireland can decide whether or not it should honor that request, and legally force Microsoft to turn the info over.
This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure.
The utilities (at least the power companies at my workplace and at my home) have very aggressive energy efficiency programs and rebates for things like upgrading to CFLs and LEDs. Every time I open a bill, half the contents are literature on other ways I can reduce my energy consumption.
Perfectly flat electricity demand is the ideal case for the utilities. They don't have to spend money on building new generating plants, which may end up superfluous if demand doesn't increase as much as expected. They don't have to string up new transmission lines to meet higher consumption. Under flat demand, their only expenses are fuel, maintenance, and labor.
I actually preferred the rubber dome keyboards when they began replacing the mechanical keyboards. I didn't like the sharp clicky response of the mechanical keyboards, and liked the softer feel of the dome keyboards. I like short-travel laptop keyboards for the reasons you outline. But I ran some speed tests versus a Thinkpad keyboard, and was surprised to find I can type faster on the Thinkpad keyboards. And I found that when typing for an extended period of time it was actually more comfortable. The increased feedback you get from the clicky-ness I dislike seems to help with certainty when touch typing, allowing me to type more quickly without worrying as much about whether I hit that key enough.
That's a bit hyperbolic - thin keyboards are thin, but certainly not flat.
The keys are in fact perfectly flat. Compare against the slightly cupped keys on a desktop keyboard and on the Thinkpad keyboards. I didn't realize how much the cupped design helped until I moved back to a keyboard with the cupping. I now consider chiclet keys to be the greatest step backwards in the modern history of keyboard design. And while Apple didn't invent it, they are responsible for making it popular.
There are some useful parts of coding which transfer over to other tasks in life. Breaking down complex problems into orthogonal chunks which you can tackle one at a time, flowcharting to design a procedural process, developing a methodology for debugging based on the logic of what the code is supposed to be doing. All of these are useful skills which can be applied to other areas of life. If you're going to be teaching software coding to the masses, it should be as a vehicle to teach them these skills. The ability to write code itself shouldn't be the goal here (except for the small percentage of people who do end up going into software).
However, software is infinitely copyable and transferable with practically zero cost. If one person writes a simple, useful piece of software, it could theoretically be distributed to every computer owned by every person in the world at almost no cost. This reduces the need for large numbers of people to know how to code. It's totally different from occupations where the duplication and transportation costs dominate. e.g. You can't have a single barber giving everyone in the world haircuts - you need about one barber per 300-400 people minimum (assuming 30 min per haircut, 8 hours/day, 24 days/mo, and one haircut per month per customer). Same goes for car mechanics and plumbers, depending on failure rates and average time to repair. And this doesn't even touch into the skills everyone will need in life but which aren't taught widely in school (cooking, managing your finances, time management, interpersonal relationships both business and romantic, basic first aid, etc.).
There is no contradiction. This is the standard 80/20 rule of thumb in engineering. Designing to achieve 80% utilization is easy and cheap. Designing to achieve the remaining 20% is hard and ridiculously expensive, and usually not worth it. All TFA and the paper do is confirm that this rule also applies to renewables.
Germany has a civil law system. Judges merely interpret the law as written, they do not set precedents. Unless there's some German national law specifically prohibiting the banning of previously sold products, there's not much a German judge can do to block a legislature from passing such a ban - the legislative body holds ultimate power. It's not like a common law system where previous court decisions about ownership rights, resale rights, and prohibitions on ex-post facto laws would come into play because they're similar, even if they didn't specifically mention banning a previously sold product.
There are a lot of factors at play here, going both ways, making the situation a lot more complicated than such a simplistic analysis.
The diesel cycle is more efficient than the Otto cycle used in gasoline engines. If you want to produce the most energy possible via combustion from a given amount of fuel, dieseling (pressurizing fuel until it auto-ignites) is the way to do it.
Diesels produce more nitrous oxides. However, it is not an inherent property of diesel fuel. It is a consequence of the reaction temperature. Even an engine burning pure hydrogen at a high power output will produce nitrous oxides. NOx is produced when atmospheric nitrogen combines with atmospheric oxygen using excess energy in the reaction chamber. Because the diesel cycle is more efficient, it results in higher combustion temperatures, which results in more NOx production. That's the unfortunate trade-off here: Higher fuel efficiency (less CO2 emissions) comes at the cost of increased NOx emissions.
The strategy employed by newer diesels is to inject a measured amount of diesel exhaust fluid (DEF, marketed as Ad-blue). It's basically ammonia, and combines with NOx to convert it into nitrogen gas and water. The process is patented by Mercedes, and licensed by other diesel engine manufacturers. VW's former CEO hated it and demanded VW engineers come up with a way to make VW's diesels compliant with emissions regulations without using DEF. Someone somewhere in VW made a decision to lie and pretend they could do it, rather than admit that they couldn't.
When you refine oil, it naturally wants to break down into a certain amount of gasoline and a certain amount of diesel (the diesel hydrocarbon chains are longer). You can break down diesel into gasoline with further refining, but it's energy-intensive. It's virtually impossible to convert gasoline into diesel. Consequently the most efficient use of oil is to simply use gasoline and diesel in the ratio in which it's most easily refined. The U.S. with its larger travel distances and large trucking industry uses about the right ratio of diesel (trucks) vs gasoline (cars). Europe, with its smaller travel distances and greater prevalence of rail transport tends to use less diesel than is refined. So they end up with excess diesel, lowering its price relative to gasoline, creating an incentive to produce cars which run on diesel. (This is also why diesel prices go up in the winter. Home heating oil is virtually identical to diesel, so the supply of diesel for transportation fuel is reduced during the winter.).
Diesel is a denser fuel than gasoline. It's about 12% heavier than the same volume of gasoline (there's 12% more "stuff" in a given volume of diesel). So the MPG figures you see for diesel are a bit overstated since we measure these fuels by volume, rather than by mass. It's still got a higher energy density though (about 3% more energy per mass). And the higher combustion efficiency means cars/trucks still get more distance per unit mass of diesel than gasoline. It's just not as much as the MPG would suggest.
Particulate emissions (mainly carbon soot) are higher with diesel, but newer diesels simply capture it in a filter and burn it off (converting it to CO2) at regular intervals. Despite this additional CO2 production, diesel's CO2 production per vehicle mile is still lower than gasoline's.
The emissions standards are a moving target, gradually becoming more stringent over the years. For example, the EPA limit on NOx emissions was 1.25 g/mile in 1994, lowered to 0.07 g/mile in 2004, and in 2017 lowered to 0.086 g/mile of NOx + other non-methane hydrocarbons. So while VW's emissions far exceeded the 2004 limit, the cars actually would've complied with the 1994 limit. In particular, the 2015 VW diesels actually complied with the EPA limit, they just slightly exceeded C
However, this assumes that data use is fixed and we know from history that as more bandwidth becomes available, consumption increases as well. Eventually though we're likely to reach a point where demand for more data doesn't scale in step with availability, but I think that this will help out considerably until people find new ways to consume mobile data.
I think we've already reached that point. I can't think of anything a typical phone user would want to do that's more bandwidth-intensive than streamed video. And just 5 Mbps is good enough for streaming 1080p video. Heck, I use my phone's 4G hotspot from time to time to stream Netflix to my tablet or laptop. The next big jump in bandwidth requirements is going to be 3D holographic recordings, but the front-end for that (a holographic camera) hasn't even been invented yet.
The benefit is not just greater overall bandwidth. Faster throughput means the 5G radio and modem on your phone does not have to be turned on for as long, resulting in increased battery life.
I wouldn't have thought this would make a big difference, but it did show up as GSM phones having slightly better talk time than CDMA phones. GSM uses TDMA for voice - each phone is assigned a timeslice and can safely turn its radio off outside of that timeslice. In CDMA, all phones transmit and receive at the same time, The coding for each phone is orthogonal, so you can separate its signal from all the others (like writing vertically and horizontally on the same paper - the letters are orthogonal enough you can distinguish which ones are vertical and which are horizontal, even though they overlap). CDMA turns out to be better for bandwidth allocation since unused bandwidth reduces the noise floor thereby increasing the SNR and bandwidth available to phones which are transmitting (in TDMA that unused bandwidth is wasted). But TDMA turns out to use less power because you know there are certain periods of time when you can turn the radio off.
Me, I'll just use Elon's low earth orbit satellites. It should work from inside an airplane, right?
The aluminum body of the airplane forms a Faraday cage blocking RF signals from outside. A little signal can leak through the windows, enough to allow cell phones to work if the plane is near a tower. But considerably weaker satellite signals stand no chance. If you've ever brought a GPS aboard a plane, you may have noticed it won't work unless you position it next to the window.
WiFi aboard planes goes through a router inside the plane, to an antenna mounted on top of the plane which relays the TCP/IP traffic to a satellite.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, subtracting buses and trucks hauling commercial goods, about half the cars on the street in Korea were taxis (the ones with the white dome on the roof). In order to fight traffic congestion, the government imposed like a $20,000 tax on cars. The result being that very few people owned their own car, and instead took taxis. There was practically no traffic congestion. If you needed to go anywhere, you could wait for a bus, or hail a taxi (usually got one within 15 seconds, almost always less than a minute). A quick ride, pay your fare, and you were done.
Then a certain U.S. Presidential candidate ruined it. He ran an ad criticizing Korea for having unfair trade barriers. You could buy a Hyundai in the U.S. for $10k, but a Ford Escort in Korea was taxed to cost $30k. He conveniently left out that that the Hyundai also cost $30k in Korea. His deception worked (though his presidential campaign did not), and Americans were outraged and demanded that Korea rescind this "unfair" tax. Korea did so, and suddenly the masses in Korea were able to afford their own car. And the streets immediately became gridlocked. What used to be a 5-6 hour bus ride from one end of the country to the other (250 miles / 400 km) during the Lunar New Year now regularly takes 24 hours because of all the cars.
In that respect, I think these studies are missing a crucial stat - how many people take Uber/Lyft instead of driving their own car or even owning a car?
I'm an old geezer like you (first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000). But AR emoji is one of the baby steps towards a completely non-tactile interface system. Like the ones portrayed in movies where people just wave their hands around in the air. If they can subsidize R&D into computer vision and facial expression recognition by marketing it as a fun feature on a new phone, I'm not gonna complain.
Who offers those steep discounts for new subscribers (people who switch carriers) and 2-for-1 specials. In other words, if you have service with that carrier and you don't buy a $1000 flagship phone, your monthly service fee is helping subsidize the purchase of those who do buy it. This is one of the reasons I really wish carriers were prohibited from selling phones. If I stick to an old phone, I want to only be paying for service, not paying to help other people upgrade their phones.
Also, the high price compared to a PC is because of the portability, not because of the capability. Same reason laptops cost more than desktops despite being less powerful.
and will become trash within 5 years... how... what... is EVERYONE RICHER THAN ME? Does no one have to make careful decisions about where to spend their money?
5 years is longer than I normally keep a phone (about 3-4 years). But if you upgrade every 3-4 years like I do, the phone (at full retail price) ends up costing about the same as eating out once a month. If you can get it at a discount, the cost is even less.
$840 / 5 years = $14/mo which is peanuts.
$840 / 4 years = $17.50/mo
$840 / 3 years = $23.33/mo. Still well within the discretionary budget of most people.
$840 / 2 years= $35/mo is starting to get a little expensive but is still acceptable to a lot of people.
$840 / 1 year = $70/mo is about when it starts to get ridiculous.
The price per month of use is in fact the correct way to analyze anything which isn't an investment (goes up in value, e.g. a house). Because even durable goods (e.g. washing machine) eventually break down and need to be replaced.
You can buy a fucking 4K TV >65" for a grand. I should know, I bought a Samsung 55" for ~$800.
Nowadays, I suspect most people spend a lot more time looking at their phones than at a 55" TV. They, unlike you, would opt for an expensive phone and a $300 1080p TV.
Hawaii is in an awkward situation when it comes to power. They only have a population of 1.5 million, 2/3 of whom live on Oahu. That's borderline too small for a nuclear plant. Because it's a remote island, transport costs dominate the price of fuels, so coal ends up being more expensive than oil. Consequently, most of their electricity is generated by burning fuel oil.
This leads to Hawaii having the highest electricity cost of any state, higher than even Alaska. It's what makes alternatives like wind and solar more popular there - their price is more competitive with fossil fuels.
Because of the high price of electricity, you really have to pick and choose when you're going to use electricity. As others have mentioned, most of the state is actually very comfortable despite the heat. The winds are consistent and it's only certain windward sides of the islands where the humidity is high enough to make it uncomfortable. By the time the air has passed over the mountainous areas, the moisture has been squeezed out making it less humid and more comfortable. So you don't actually need to run air conditioners a lot of the time. It's not like the Indian subcontinent or East Asia, where the humidity is absolutely oppressive during the monsoon season and makes the outdoors feel like a sauna.
The point of the Powerwalls is to allow wind-generated electricity at night to be stored for later use during the day. As has been pointed out, it's mostly a PR stunt since the cost of the Powerwalls would make this non-competitive versus even oil-generated electricity in any real cost comparison. But one hopes it will become cost competitive in the future.
leading the astute reader to question the function so-called editors serve...
I figured it out. We're the ones making the mistake by thinking that the editors serve the reader by eliminating errors and clarifying content.. They actually serve the site - their function is to increase clicks on articles and thereby ad impressions. If an error leads to more people clicking on the article, that's a win in their book.
The problem with blaming employers for hiring illegal (undocumented*) immigrants is that the U.S. government makes it impossible to actually verify if a potential hiree is in fact authorized to work in the U.S. I used to manage a company which was in an area with a known large illegal immigrant population, so I spoke with several immigration attorneys about this and how to avoid accidentally hiring someone who wasn't authorized to work in the U.S.
Their legal advice was all the same: Fill out the I-9 form for everyone we hired, and make photocopies of the two pieces of official documentation presented as proof of work eligibility. The government provides no way to confirm that these documents are legit, so the I-9 and photocopies become proof that we did our due diligence, and shields us from prosecution for hiring unauthorized workers.
In other words, the way the system is currently set up, having illegal immigrants on your payroll is not proof of wrongdoing by the employer. If the employee presented what seemed to be proper work documents at the time of their hiring, the employer has done nothing wrong by hiring them. And in fact the employer can be sued if they deny employment to anyone because they suspect the documentation was forged, and it turns out to be legit. Basically the employer has no choice but to accept without proof that any provided documentation is legit.
If you really want to stop illegal immigrants* from being hired, the government simply has to set up a system where the authenticity of work documents can be confirmed by employers prior to hiring someone. Most of the people we later found to have presented forged docs were woefully easy to spot - the name didn't match the SSN, or the last known residence didn't match the SSN. Oddly, the people who are most likely to blame employers for hiring illegal immigrants are also the ones most vehemently opposed to this type of system to easily authenticate work documents.
* This is why the term "undocumented immigrant" is a misnomer - there is no way for an employer to distinguish a documented immigrant, from an undocumented immigrant who is doing everything in their power to fool you into thinking they are documented. The only definitions which work are:
Illegal immigrant - someone who is in the country illegally and uses forged documents to trick an employer into hiring them.
Undocumented immigrant - someone an employer hired without properly checking their work documentation.
Approximately 505,000 cubic kilometres (121,000 cu mi) of water falls as precipitation each year; 398,000 cubic kilometres (95,000 cu mi) of it over the oceans.
With a population of 7.6 billion, that's 14 million liters per person per year (38,000 liters per person per day) of fresh water literally falling from the skies.
Water shortages are not the problem. They're a symptom. Find out what's preventing these people from moving to an area where water (and presumably other services) are more readily available, or preventing readily available water from being made available for consumption. That will be your problem.
Is a simple one-semester "basic life skills" course. It should cover:
Time management / prioritizing.
Home finance management and basic accounting. So people know how to file taxes (or know they're supposed to file taxes), know when to get insurance and when not to, won't go nuts with their first credit card, won't take out unrealistic student loans, won't get ripped off with exorbitant hidden interest rates.
Recognizing common scams, logical fallacies, and counter-intuitive statistical quirks like Simpson's Paradox.
Negotiation, compromise, personal communications / interpersonal relationships - otherwise they graduate HS thinking the popularity hierarchy is the norm.
College, scholarships, internships, and job interviews. I immigrated as a child and my parents knew none of this so I had to figure it all out on my own (before the Internet).
Basic mechanics and electronics. So people can handle simple household repairs, and know why your car needs regular oil changes. Should cover basics of energy and power (subset of physics) so people don't believe silly things like making batteries out of lemons (the energy comes from the refined metals you stick into the lemon, not the lemon).
Basic cooking. So people don't waste money on fast food all their lives.
Even if you don't major in math, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't major in English, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't work in government, you will find knowledge of civics useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't major in biology, you will find knowledge of it useful from time to time in life.
Physics and chemistry are electives in most high schools, not required.
Even if you don't major in a foreign language, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
If you don't major in Computer Science, you will never use it in your life. Same reason there's no engineering requirement, fine arts requirement, hairstyling requirement, acting requirement, archeology requirement, photography requirement, animal husbandry requirement, etc. Knowledge of these fields is highly specialized, and provides zero or next to zero benefit for those not working in those fields. You can offer these as electives to students interested in it, but making it a requirement is silly.
The country needs a home financial management HS requirement far more than it needs a CS requirement. Heck, even an auto shop requirement would be more useful to most students during their lifetime.
This isn't a race to the bottom. For those of you who aren't old enough to remember air travel before deregulation, prices were about twice as high back then.
If you want as much service and frills as we had back then, you can still get them by paying extra for them. The only thing that's changed is that you have the option of paying less if you're willing to give up the frills and additional service. If you choose to pay less for worse service, then that's your decision. Not the airline's.
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Actually, NATO standardized on the smaller 5.56 mm round because in testing they discovered it would tumble, imparting more energy to the flesh and causing larger woulds. The M1 Garand (standard issue U.S. rifle in WWII) used .30-'06 rounds (7.62mm) which were so powerful they would punch right through a person. Good for a kill shot, but it tended to be all-or-nothing. Either you killed the target, or you just created a straight hole which could be bandaged up.
The 5.56 mm rounds were better at creating injuries - lower kill rate but higher rate of incapacitating the target. And strategically it's better to wound enemy soldiers than to kill them. If you kill them, the enemy just ignores the bodies. If they're wounded, the enemy has to tie up resources recovering and evacuating the wounded, and additional resources for hospitalization and medical care.
So no, the primary purpose of guns is not to kill more efficiently. That's a fantasy concocted by people trying to think of the worst possible rationale for something they dislike. The purpose of guns is to intimidate - make people fear the consequences of noncompliance with the person holding the gun. That's why sometimes police with guns can defuse a situation without ever firing a shot. If you believe the killing theory, then such a resolution should be impossible because the gun was never fired and thus had no opportunity to kill anyone.
Intimidation is actually the main purpose of most weapons. Have you ever wondered why "decimate" is a synonym for utterly destroying, but it actually means killing just 1 in 10? Because killing isn't actually the purpose of weapons and war. It's intimidation. And killing 1 in 10 people in an opposing army was usually sufficient to cause the remaining 9 to rout and flee. Nukes are a good example - they worked to keep the U.S. from meddling with the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, and vice versa, even though they were never used. Ukraine lacking them (they disarmed after assurances from the West that we'd protect them from invasion) is what allowed Russia to waltz in and grab Crimea.
Oh my. If you lived any reasonable distance outside of a city in the 18th century and didn't have a rifle, your family starved. It was the primary means of putting meat on the table. Part of the reason the U.S. won the Revolutionary War was because a significant fraction of the milita were sharpshooters skilled with using rifles (muskets with rifling to spin-stabilize the bullet increasing accuracy) for hunting. The British still followed the "line everyone up and fire a volley at once" strategy, which works great against an enemy doing the same thing back at you. Not so well against sharpshooters hiding in the woods picking you off one by one from a distance.
(And if you're curious, no I don't own a gun. I don't even like them, and have never shot one aside from a BB gun. I just took the time to educate myself about the issue before drawing conclusions.)
I've met a lot of native Chinese who, when the topic drifted to systems of government, insisted that they were OK with the Communist party's monopoly on power in China. That yeah it had a lot of downsides, but they were ushering in a lot of improvements too. I had a really hard time trying to convince them that those improvements probably would've happened even without the Party.
A move like eliminating term limits lays bare the truth about the motivations of the people in power. And will probably do more than any outsider ever could to convince the people that single-party control is wrong.
To quote the old Battlestar Galactica series: The opposite of war is not peace. The opposite of war is slavery. Democracy just tries to keep the fighting confined to verbal attacks in a legislative building. And a move like this could convince a lot of Chinese that they're living as slaves instead of at peace, spurring them to fight for their freedom.
While I agree the cost of an ambulance ride is ridiculous, the amount that's charged is actually in line with what it costs to operate one. Ambulances cost about a quarter million dollars to purchase and outfit. So right off the bat you're at 10x the cost of a private car used for taxi services. Then you have to pay for the labor costs of two, sometimes three EMTs aboard instead of a single driver. And you're amortizing all this over a lot fewer rides per day than a taxi service. So it actually makes sense that they cost several tens of times more than a taxi service.
Those of you in countries where national health care covers it are still paying the same amount. You're just paying it via everyone's taxes instead of it being billed to the person getting the ride.
Economic situations like this normally resolve themselves by dividing into different tiers of service. e.g. If you only need a ride, a cheaper, less outfitted ambulance (or Uber) can provide that service. However, medical emergencies where lives are at stake cause people to "play it safe" regardless of cost, resulting in patients always traveling in the fully outfitted maximum expense ambulance for even the most minor of injuries. As another example, I've got several thousands of dollars of safety and first aid equipment aboard my boat which will probably never be used. We're so far up the cost/benefit curve that the marginal price increase is huge for a tiny bit of extra benefit. There really isn't a good solution here (in terms of reducing overall cost to society) unless you're willing to accept an increased risk of someone who is being transported dying while en route.
The first time a sick/injured person who does this dies or isn't treated in a timely manner sues Uber because an Uber driver didn't rush them to the hospital despite knowing they needed to visit the ER, Uber will institute a policy prohibiting drivers from asking passengers if they are sick/injured and need the ER.
That in turn will bite people who were fine when they got into the Uber car, but collapse / have a heart attack / have a stroke during the ride. The driver will then be prohibited from asking if they need assistance and will probably be required to assume they've just fallen asleep.
Actually, it's HR which come up with those inane lists of qualifications. They do it to reduce the stack of resumes they'll receive, so they won't have to work as hard to pick out a dozen candidates for interviews. The boss just wants someone who can do the job, and couldn't care less how many years experience you have if you can do the job.
Yeah, this case is basically the U.S. version of the German cases requiring search engines to strike Nazi results worldwide, and French cases requiring websites abroad to block content deemed illegal in France.
It's one of those situations where you only see the advantages if you consider only yourself (your country). But the disadvantages become obvious when you consider the world as a whole. e.g. "What if you could have sex with anyone who wanted?" Most people think that would be fantastic. "What if anyone could have sex with you?" Suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great idea.
The only decision which makes sense if you want to preserve the integrity of national borders is that U.S. law stops at the U.S. border, German law stops at the German border, French law stops at France's border. If the U.S. wants to get its hands on information Microsoft is storing in Ireland, they should file a request with Irish authorities (similar to an extradition request). Then Ireland can decide whether or not it should honor that request, and legally force Microsoft to turn the info over.
The utilities (at least the power companies at my workplace and at my home) have very aggressive energy efficiency programs and rebates for things like upgrading to CFLs and LEDs. Every time I open a bill, half the contents are literature on other ways I can reduce my energy consumption.
Perfectly flat electricity demand is the ideal case for the utilities. They don't have to spend money on building new generating plants, which may end up superfluous if demand doesn't increase as much as expected. They don't have to string up new transmission lines to meet higher consumption. Under flat demand, their only expenses are fuel, maintenance, and labor.
The keys are in fact perfectly flat. Compare against the slightly cupped keys on a desktop keyboard and on the Thinkpad keyboards. I didn't realize how much the cupped design helped until I moved back to a keyboard with the cupping. I now consider chiclet keys to be the greatest step backwards in the modern history of keyboard design. And while Apple didn't invent it, they are responsible for making it popular.
There are some useful parts of coding which transfer over to other tasks in life. Breaking down complex problems into orthogonal chunks which you can tackle one at a time, flowcharting to design a procedural process, developing a methodology for debugging based on the logic of what the code is supposed to be doing. All of these are useful skills which can be applied to other areas of life. If you're going to be teaching software coding to the masses, it should be as a vehicle to teach them these skills. The ability to write code itself shouldn't be the goal here (except for the small percentage of people who do end up going into software).
However, software is infinitely copyable and transferable with practically zero cost. If one person writes a simple, useful piece of software, it could theoretically be distributed to every computer owned by every person in the world at almost no cost. This reduces the need for large numbers of people to know how to code. It's totally different from occupations where the duplication and transportation costs dominate. e.g. You can't have a single barber giving everyone in the world haircuts - you need about one barber per 300-400 people minimum (assuming 30 min per haircut, 8 hours/day, 24 days/mo, and one haircut per month per customer). Same goes for car mechanics and plumbers, depending on failure rates and average time to repair. And this doesn't even touch into the skills everyone will need in life but which aren't taught widely in school (cooking, managing your finances, time management, interpersonal relationships both business and romantic, basic first aid, etc.).
There is no contradiction. This is the standard 80/20 rule of thumb in engineering. Designing to achieve 80% utilization is easy and cheap. Designing to achieve the remaining 20% is hard and ridiculously expensive, and usually not worth it. All TFA and the paper do is confirm that this rule also applies to renewables.
Germany has a civil law system. Judges merely interpret the law as written, they do not set precedents. Unless there's some German national law specifically prohibiting the banning of previously sold products, there's not much a German judge can do to block a legislature from passing such a ban - the legislative body holds ultimate power. It's not like a common law system where previous court decisions about ownership rights, resale rights, and prohibitions on ex-post facto laws would come into play because they're similar, even if they didn't specifically mention banning a previously sold product.
I think we've already reached that point. I can't think of anything a typical phone user would want to do that's more bandwidth-intensive than streamed video. And just 5 Mbps is good enough for streaming 1080p video. Heck, I use my phone's 4G hotspot from time to time to stream Netflix to my tablet or laptop. The next big jump in bandwidth requirements is going to be 3D holographic recordings, but the front-end for that (a holographic camera) hasn't even been invented yet.
The benefit is not just greater overall bandwidth. Faster throughput means the 5G radio and modem on your phone does not have to be turned on for as long, resulting in increased battery life.
I wouldn't have thought this would make a big difference, but it did show up as GSM phones having slightly better talk time than CDMA phones. GSM uses TDMA for voice - each phone is assigned a timeslice and can safely turn its radio off outside of that timeslice. In CDMA, all phones transmit and receive at the same time, The coding for each phone is orthogonal, so you can separate its signal from all the others (like writing vertically and horizontally on the same paper - the letters are orthogonal enough you can distinguish which ones are vertical and which are horizontal, even though they overlap). CDMA turns out to be better for bandwidth allocation since unused bandwidth reduces the noise floor thereby increasing the SNR and bandwidth available to phones which are transmitting (in TDMA that unused bandwidth is wasted). But TDMA turns out to use less power because you know there are certain periods of time when you can turn the radio off.
The aluminum body of the airplane forms a Faraday cage blocking RF signals from outside. A little signal can leak through the windows, enough to allow cell phones to work if the plane is near a tower. But considerably weaker satellite signals stand no chance. If you've ever brought a GPS aboard a plane, you may have noticed it won't work unless you position it next to the window.
WiFi aboard planes goes through a router inside the plane, to an antenna mounted on top of the plane which relays the TCP/IP traffic to a satellite.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, subtracting buses and trucks hauling commercial goods, about half the cars on the street in Korea were taxis (the ones with the white dome on the roof). In order to fight traffic congestion, the government imposed like a $20,000 tax on cars. The result being that very few people owned their own car, and instead took taxis. There was practically no traffic congestion. If you needed to go anywhere, you could wait for a bus, or hail a taxi (usually got one within 15 seconds, almost always less than a minute). A quick ride, pay your fare, and you were done.
Then a certain U.S. Presidential candidate ruined it. He ran an ad criticizing Korea for having unfair trade barriers. You could buy a Hyundai in the U.S. for $10k, but a Ford Escort in Korea was taxed to cost $30k. He conveniently left out that that the Hyundai also cost $30k in Korea. His deception worked (though his presidential campaign did not), and Americans were outraged and demanded that Korea rescind this "unfair" tax. Korea did so, and suddenly the masses in Korea were able to afford their own car. And the streets immediately became gridlocked. What used to be a 5-6 hour bus ride from one end of the country to the other (250 miles / 400 km) during the Lunar New Year now regularly takes 24 hours because of all the cars.
In that respect, I think these studies are missing a crucial stat - how many people take Uber/Lyft instead of driving their own car or even owning a car?
I'm an old geezer like you (first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000). But AR emoji is one of the baby steps towards a completely non-tactile interface system. Like the ones portrayed in movies where people just wave their hands around in the air. If they can subsidize R&D into computer vision and facial expression recognition by marketing it as a fun feature on a new phone, I'm not gonna complain.
Also, the high price compared to a PC is because of the portability, not because of the capability. Same reason laptops cost more than desktops despite being less powerful.
5 years is longer than I normally keep a phone (about 3-4 years). But if you upgrade every 3-4 years like I do, the phone (at full retail price) ends up costing about the same as eating out once a month. If you can get it at a discount, the cost is even less.
The price per month of use is in fact the correct way to analyze anything which isn't an investment (goes up in value, e.g. a house). Because even durable goods (e.g. washing machine) eventually break down and need to be replaced.
Nowadays, I suspect most people spend a lot more time looking at their phones than at a 55" TV. They, unlike you, would opt for an expensive phone and a $300 1080p TV.
Hawaii is in an awkward situation when it comes to power. They only have a population of 1.5 million, 2/3 of whom live on Oahu. That's borderline too small for a nuclear plant. Because it's a remote island, transport costs dominate the price of fuels, so coal ends up being more expensive than oil. Consequently, most of their electricity is generated by burning fuel oil.
This leads to Hawaii having the highest electricity cost of any state, higher than even Alaska. It's what makes alternatives like wind and solar more popular there - their price is more competitive with fossil fuels.
Because of the high price of electricity, you really have to pick and choose when you're going to use electricity. As others have mentioned, most of the state is actually very comfortable despite the heat. The winds are consistent and it's only certain windward sides of the islands where the humidity is high enough to make it uncomfortable. By the time the air has passed over the mountainous areas, the moisture has been squeezed out making it less humid and more comfortable. So you don't actually need to run air conditioners a lot of the time. It's not like the Indian subcontinent or East Asia, where the humidity is absolutely oppressive during the monsoon season and makes the outdoors feel like a sauna.
The point of the Powerwalls is to allow wind-generated electricity at night to be stored for later use during the day. As has been pointed out, it's mostly a PR stunt since the cost of the Powerwalls would make this non-competitive versus even oil-generated electricity in any real cost comparison. But one hopes it will become cost competitive in the future.
I figured it out. We're the ones making the mistake by thinking that the editors serve the reader by eliminating errors and clarifying content.. They actually serve the site - their function is to increase clicks on articles and thereby ad impressions. If an error leads to more people clicking on the article, that's a win in their book.
Their legal advice was all the same: Fill out the I-9 form for everyone we hired, and make photocopies of the two pieces of official documentation presented as proof of work eligibility. The government provides no way to confirm that these documents are legit, so the I-9 and photocopies become proof that we did our due diligence, and shields us from prosecution for hiring unauthorized workers.
In other words, the way the system is currently set up, having illegal immigrants on your payroll is not proof of wrongdoing by the employer. If the employee presented what seemed to be proper work documents at the time of their hiring, the employer has done nothing wrong by hiring them. And in fact the employer can be sued if they deny employment to anyone because they suspect the documentation was forged, and it turns out to be legit. Basically the employer has no choice but to accept without proof that any provided documentation is legit.
If you really want to stop illegal immigrants* from being hired, the government simply has to set up a system where the authenticity of work documents can be confirmed by employers prior to hiring someone. Most of the people we later found to have presented forged docs were woefully easy to spot - the name didn't match the SSN, or the last known residence didn't match the SSN. Oddly, the people who are most likely to blame employers for hiring illegal immigrants are also the ones most vehemently opposed to this type of system to easily authenticate work documents.
* This is why the term "undocumented immigrant" is a misnomer - there is no way for an employer to distinguish a documented immigrant, from an undocumented immigrant who is doing everything in their power to fool you into thinking they are documented. The only definitions which work are:
With a population of 7.6 billion, that's 14 million liters per person per year (38,000 liters per person per day) of fresh water literally falling from the skies.
Water shortages are not the problem. They're a symptom. Find out what's preventing these people from moving to an area where water (and presumably other services) are more readily available, or preventing readily available water from being made available for consumption. That will be your problem.
Even if you don't major in math, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't major in English, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't work in government, you will find knowledge of civics useful from time to time in life.
Even if you don't major in biology, you will find knowledge of it useful from time to time in life.
Physics and chemistry are electives in most high schools, not required.
Even if you don't major in a foreign language, you will find it useful from time to time in life.
If you don't major in Computer Science, you will never use it in your life. Same reason there's no engineering requirement, fine arts requirement, hairstyling requirement, acting requirement, archeology requirement, photography requirement, animal husbandry requirement, etc. Knowledge of these fields is highly specialized, and provides zero or next to zero benefit for those not working in those fields. You can offer these as electives to students interested in it, but making it a requirement is silly.
The country needs a home financial management HS requirement far more than it needs a CS requirement. Heck, even an auto shop requirement would be more useful to most students during their lifetime.
This isn't a race to the bottom. For those of you who aren't old enough to remember air travel before deregulation, prices were about twice as high back then.
If you want as much service and frills as we had back then, you can still get them by paying extra for them. The only thing that's changed is that you have the option of paying less if you're willing to give up the frills and additional service. If you choose to pay less for worse service, then that's your decision. Not the airline's.