Total expenditures for public elementary and secondary schools in the United States in 2013â"14 amounted to $634 billion, or $12,509 per public school student enrolled in the fall (in constant 2015â"16 dollars).
(Discrepancy with the OECD stats is due to being from different years, and the OECD stats including post-secondary non-tertiary education, while the NCES stats are for only K-12).
Spending per student has about doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 40 years. and tripled since the 1960s. It peaked around 2007, and the people trying to get even more money put into education have been abusing that by using 2007 as the start of their spending graphs.
Where is all the money going? I don't have time to find it again, but the Education Department's own stats are contradictory. If you take the amount of spending it lists in teacher non-salary benefits, and divide it by the number of teachers they give, it ends up something like $50k/yr per teacher. What's going on is the number of non-teaching administrators has exploded since 1970, far outpacing the growth in number of students. These administrators have been hiding it by shifting some of their salary expenses into those of teachers in the stats. Every time education receives a spending increase, the administrators sop up most of it and let only a trickle get through to teachers. Every time education receives a spending cut, these administrators pass it all on directly to the teachers and students, while protecting their own jobs and salaries. As a result, the teachers are constantly complaining of not having enough money despite the huge increases in education spending over the decades.
The ISS was only designed with a 15 year life expectancy. It is currently about 18 years old (some modules are older, some newer), and by 2025 it'll be 25 years old. NASA figures the absolute deadline is 2028. So 2025 is a good retirement date if you want a safety margin. It's commensurate with a previous NASA study which green-lighted keeping it operational until 2024.
Discussion should be focused on what comes next. Not on how to keep the ISS flying. The Space Shuttle was retired for the same reason - its components were designed with only a max 30 year lifespan in mind. Retrofitting it for longer service would've involved replacing all these parts. And if you're going to do that, you might as well design something completely new that takes advantage of new technology that's been developed in the previous 20+ years.
Only if the government has decided that it can be sued for that issue. Sovereign immunity starts off absolute, and exceptions are only allowed when the government itself decides to allow them.
Since New Zealand is part of the British Commonwealth, they share the UK's common law which includes sovereign immunity. So I too am curious if the kiwi government has allowed themselves to be sued in this manner.
The display of an LCD is extremely power-thrifty. The old digital watches (with LCD displays) could run for over the year on a single button cell battery. That corresponds to a power draw of about 0.01 mW.
It's the backlight which consumes huge amounts of power, not the LCD itself.
That's not to dismiss ePaper - it doesn't need to be refreshed. It only consumes power when you're changing the image. LCDs need to be refreshed to maintain an image, and when you have pixels arranged in a grid the rows need to be addressed in sequence, which is going to take more power than more limited LCDs like an old digital watch display. But likewise if you're using ePaper to display a clock face, then it too is going to have be refreshed (either once a second or once a minute).
Fitbit didn't buy Pebble, they only bought the IP. Your Pebble products were discontinued because Pebble went bankrupt. Nothing to do with Fitbit.
Fitbit is keeping Pebble's ecosystem going until mid-2018 despite having no obligation to do so. If Fitbit (or anyone else) hadn't bought Pebble's IP, you would've lost support and the ecosystem when Pebble shut down in Dec 2016. If people persist in blaming Fitbit for "killing" Pebble, next time a popular company goes bankrupt the buyer will probably just buy the IP and let the old product lines die then and there just to avoid the negative stigma from misinformed customers.
If you want to blame someone for the fiasco, blame Pebble's management who let the situation become so bad before seeking buyers, that the company had accrued so much debt that nobody wanted to buy the company outright (debt > assets) and keep the product lines going..
The conspiracy theorist response would be that Microsoft already got most of the data they wanted (which programs you use, how often you use them, how big your porn collection is, etc). Now that they've built up profiles for most of their customers, they can scale back the telemetry, then reveal what they're collecting to the public. And this amounts to them claiming, "See? We aren't collecting any personal info.... [whispered to themselves: anymore...]"
(c)Nonrequired Element of Offense.â"
It is not a required element of any offense under this section that the minor depicted actually exist.
If it looks like a child and is porn, it's illegal. So "I thought it was fake" doesn't work as an excuse. The reasoning for this is that fictional depictions of child porn could create demand for more of it, which in turn could result in someone exploiting kids to make real child porn.
Also note that in general, you have the right to control your own image. As such, if someone were to use said software to generate porn that looks like you and distribute it, they would be in violation of your personality rights. At the very least you could get them to stop distributing it. At the most you could sue them for damages. The only loophole is that many countries do not recognize personality rights for dead people. So you might be able to get away with generating and distributing fake porn of dead celebrities.
Companies don't innovate. There's not enough money on the table to make it worth while. Aside from the occasional bored aristocrat it's mostly been the government that financed innovation; usually through the public university system. But nobody wants to pay the taxes for that.
Heck, we just borrowed $1.5 trillion over 10 years to finance massive tax cuts
The last major tax cut was 15 years ago. The drop in tax revenue in the last decade was due to the recession following the collapse of the housing bubble. Currently, tax revenue is back up to "normal" levels (if you define the highest it's ever been historically as "normal").
What's busting the budget is a refusal to cut spending to match revenue (notice the trendline for tax receipts is flat, while the trendline for spending is climbing). This is primarily driven by growth of entitlement programs. The CBO has been warning us about that since at least 1998 (when I started reading the CBO reports).
And before you claim we should balance the budget by paying more taxes, consider that the tax burden in the U.S. is already among the highest in the world. People claiming U.S. taxes are low usually only look at Federal taxes, and fail to account for state and local taxes. U.S. tax burden is the third highest of the 20 largest economies in the world (only France and Italy have a higher tax burden). That's right, Americans pay more taxes (as percent of GDP) than socialist countries like Canada, the UK, Germany.
Summary even states that the main reason the U.S. dropped was because of low percentage of STEM college graduates.
I would consider not knowing your Twitter password a badge of honor (not having an account even more so).
Not having a Twitter account is a badge of honor.
Having a Twitter account but not knowing your password is a badge of shame. It most likely means you set the app to remember your password so you don't have to type it in every time to login. Meaning anyone you lend your phone to, or steals your phone and manages to bypass its unlock security, can send out tweets in your name.
Apps which access personal or private data should never remember your password, and require a fresh login not only when you start the app, but also if it's been placed in the background for more than a few minutes. If you hate remembering all the different passwords for all your accounts, use a password manager and be sure to remember its password.
This does bring up the issue of why we're considering a message coming from a specific Twitter account to be an official channel. If you instead use something like a two-key digital signature to authenticate your message, then any platform - a personal blog, a slashdot post, even an anonymous message left on the local newspaper's website - could be used as an official channel, since it gives the media a means to validate that the message was sent by you (the person who holds the private key). The media just needs to know where to get the governor's public key. There's no need to use a login/password proprietary to one company.
That's actually relevant. The price you pay for protective regulation is a slower rate of technological development. Short-term, this doesn't mean much and it's "obvious" that the regulations are superior.
But long-term... If clean air laws increase lifespan by x years, but lack of clean air laws allows technology to advance so people end up with more than x years of additional leisure time over their lifetime, which is really better?
I don't honestly know the answer. I don't even know if we can figure out the answer (since we're talking about guessing at what technological breakthroughs will happen in the future). But if you're judging the merit of clean air/water regulations based solely on whether you prefer clean air/water or not, then your analysis is overly simplistic.
China's decision was a bit easier since they were behind the developed world technologically - they could see the beneficial technologies they were going to get in this bargain. They made a decision to sacrifice something like 10 years of life expectancy, in order to make up a 40 year deficit in technology and catch up to first world nations. If they decide to clean up their air and water now, that 10 year sacrifice in lifespan will only have affected one or two generations, while the 40 year jump in technology will benefit all future generations to come. They probably think that bargain was worth it.
And how is that different from before? In the old days people would hang out with friends who were similar to themselves, shielded from exposure to dissenting ideas and having their beliefs reinforced instead of challenged. Now that people are doing the exact same thing online, suddenly it's the end of democracy as we know it? I remember reading an article in the 1980s about how you could guess someone's political affiliation pretty accurately by looking at which magazines they subscribed to. Nothing has really changed except the nature of the subscriptions and the speed of the discourse (instead of forums, we had letters to the editors).
Instead of thinking of this as evidence of democracy failing because of people hanging out in their own cliques, maybe we should think of it as democracy having succeeded in spite of people hanging out in their own cliques. IMHO democracy's strength doesn't come from there being One Truth that everyone has to be convinced to believe in. It come from the incredible diversity of ideas that it can generate precisely because it values everyone and all their differences equally. Other more officious styles of government attempt to stamp out this diversity, meaning on average it takes a longer time for a good idea to percolate up to be noticed and implemented by those in charge - sometimes decades or centuries. With democracy, it can happen in a matter of months if not weeks.
Perhaps the value of that quicker response time outweighs the drawbacks of people isolating themselves in their own cliques with their own insular ideas. That as long as we have a wide diversity of such cliques (who aren't actively trying to kill each other), it doesn't really matter if individuals restrict themselves to just one clique.
The obvious free market choice here is for Nvidia to design a second series of GPUs tailor-made for cryptocurrency mining. Just drop the features mining doesn't need like texture render units, add more of the features mining does need. They already do this sort of parallel product development for gaming cards vs CAD/CAM cards. Although the gaming cards are cheaper than CAD/CAM cards, they have worse performance per dollar at CAD/CAM applications, thus keeping this product differentiation viable.
They're unwilling to do this probably because they aren't confident that cryptocurrency mining will be around that long, and any money they put into parallel development of cards specifically for mining could end up being wasted. If the market were truly free, other GPU manufacturers would step in and take the risk. That's how the market responds to uncertainty - someone willing to take the risk will either be bankrupted by it (if mining turns out to be a fad), or be catapulted to new market dominance (if mining is here for good). Unfortunately, we let Nvidia and AMD/ATI buy up all the smaller GPU manufacturers, leaving us with just two behemoths. If neither of them are willing to take the risk, then that's the end of market forces on this particular issue.
Problem is democracy can offer people free public education and a free press, but it can't force them to take it. That would violate the core tenet of democracy - that the people be free to decide for themselves what's important. And if as you claim these things are essential for a functional democracy, but the people don't want these things, then you've just proven that democracy is untenable.
The problem is something called sampling bias. If you only look for meddling by Russia in only decisions you dislike, then you can only find meddling by Russia only in decisions you dislike. e.g. If your landlord claims your apartment is filthy and is the source of the cockroaches that everyone in the building has been complaining about, and he does an extensive search for roaches in your apartment and finds some, that doesn't prove his claim. For all we know, your apartment could be the cleanest one in the building, and if he'd done the same extensive search on the other apartments he would've found a lot more roaches. But by searching only your unit, he's abusing sampling bias - cherry picking data by only looking in certain places - to try to make it appear as if you're the one at fault.*
If you want to investigate something like this in an objective manner, you need to look for meddling into all big political decisions by all foreign powers. This includes meddling by Facebook (a US corporation) abusing sampling bias to try to discredit the UK Brexit vote via a press release that millions if not tens of millions of Britons will hear about in the news..
* In this case the statistical error (by Facebook) is intentional. But sampling bias can creep in unintentionally too. The classic example is a surveyor tasked with finding out how many hours city residents ride the subway on average, so the city can make better decisions on if subway service should be expanded. He starts off by asking random people on the street how often they ride the subway each week. He grows frustrated that most people don't ride the subway at all, making it difficult for him to gather the required minimum number of positive responses to minimize the margin of error. Then he's struck with inspiration. He'll simply got aboard a subway train and ask the riders how many hours they ride each week. Since everyone on the subway must be subway riders, that'll neatly filter out all the non-riders he's been wasting his time with.
The problem is when you ask people riding on the subway instead of random people on the street, the odds of you encountering a heavy subway user are higher. e.g. If 80% of subway riders ride the subway 1 hour a week, and 20% ride it 10 hours a week, you are 2.5x as likely to sample a 10 hr/wk rider than you are a 1 hr/wk rider simply because they're on the subway a lot longer. So the statistical data you gather this way ends up biased high by your sampling method.
That's a fine concept when you're talking about a majority in a mixed population.
In this case, there's a very sharp geographic delineation between population. The bulk of the population lives in a geographically small region (urban areas). I'm not saying splitting the state is a good idea, but insisting on majority rule for such a huge swath of area with this type of delineation delineation results in the urban areas imposing laws which make sense in only (say) 10% of the state (by land area) upon the remaining 90%.
e.g. California is graduating its minimum wage to $15 by 2023. $15/hr may be the correct amount in urban areas where traditional minimum wage businesses (e.g. fast food restaurants) have a huge population to draw customers from so can absorb the increase in labor expenses relatively easily. But in more sparsely populated rural areas, it could very well mean the difference between a restaurant staying in business or going out of business. A full-time $15/hr job (40 hrs/wk, 50 weeks/yr) is $30k/yr, which is really close to the median household income of some of these rural counties. In those counties, a $15/hr minimum wage may be devastating to the economies of those counties.
Again, I'm not saying this proposal is a good one. Just that the idea of splitting huge states into smaller governing regions is not totally without merit when the majority start imposing laws which simply don't make sense outside of the small areas where the majority lives.
You do realize whether a U.S. territory chooses to become a state is totally under their own control. All they have to do is vote to become a state. Nobody is stopping them from holding that vote and declaring they want to become a state. The only people keeping it from happening is themselves.
Puerto Rico doesn't want to become a state because being merely a territory means Puerto Ricans don't have to pay Federal income tax (unless they work within a U.S. state or for the government). As a territory, they get nearly all the benefits of statehood, without having to pay Federal income tax.
Debt is how much you owe. Deficit is how much you owe this year. It's easy to wipe out a deficit short-term. The tricky part is doing it in ways which work long-term. Simply raising taxes leads to long-term economic slowdown, which reduces tax revenue, meaning you didn't really reduce the deficit, you just shifted it into future years. The net result being long-term increase in debt.
Simply considering only deficit also ignores the value of long-term investments (e.g. infrastructure like roads). A state which spends money fixing up roads spikes their deficit one year, but reduces it for 20-50 years in the future (duration depends on how competent a repair job they did). Likewise, a state which simply stops repairing infrastructure to reduce the deficit for a year is setting itself up for long-term pain in a way which doesn't show up in a simple debt/deficit analysis.
tl;dr - How well a state is managing its budget is a lot more complicated than a simple deficit analysis. Here are several ways to analyze it.
Summary mentions it, but glosses over the consequences of dropping the last significant digit of the heading when making a runway number (e.g. 140 becomes 14). That means that your heading as you're approaching a runway has to be within +/- 5 degrees of the runway number. So no, it'd be stupid to use the number to line up exactly with a runway. You can only use the number as a sanity check - make sure you're in the right ballpark of being lined up. If you should be in the ballpark of being lined up but the runway looks askew, then you're looking at the wrong runway.
Likewise, this means only runways in a narrow range of orientations have to be renumbered. e.g. A runway which used to be 145.5 magnetic and thus 15/33 is now 144.5 magnetic and is renumbered to 14/32. A runway which used to be 147 magnetic is now 146 magnetic and can retain its 15/33 marking. It's not like they're renumbering every runway out there.
The way I'd explain Relativity to a kid is that people always thought that time and space (distance) were universal constants, and everything could be represented assuming those two were constant. If two people are in the same location observing the same thing, but one person is stationary and the other moving, a light beam will appear to be moving at a different speed to the two people.
Einstein showed that the speed of light is what stays constant. Light appears to move at the same speed to both those people in the above example. Space and time themselves warp to make that possible. In this case, by time appearing to pass more slowly for one person.
If this is a typical 9-year old, he'll think "that's weird," go to sleep, and the next day his mind will be back on TV, video games, and sports. If he's atypical, he's going to spend a long time awake thinking about this and have a bunch more questions for you in the morning. Then you can introduce him to all sorts of fun stuff like light clocks, the twin paradox, (the lack of) simultaneity (I especially like the ladder paradox since it's very intuitive and demonstrates how the loss of simultaneity resolves seeming paradoxes).
Your 2FA can be via mobile phone (SMS), another email account, the Google Authenticator app (though I'd recommend Authy instead), or a pre-generated set of recovery keys you can store on your computer (or write down on a post-it and stick it to your monitor if you wish). The latter two don't require giving up any personal info, and are arguably more secure anyway.
I'd recommend Authy instead of Google Authenticator. It's compatible, but adds a bunch of features like multi-device support, a PC client, and encrypted backup of its database. Most importantly, it simply adds a password. If you have Google Authenticator on your phone and you don't have the lockscreen enabled (or you hand your phone to a friend with it unlocked), anyone who picks up/steals the phone can use your Google Authenticator to login to the accounts it's supposed to be protecting. With Authy, you have to enter a passcode or password to be able to use it. It's free if you use it fewer than 100 times per month. (For enterprise use, try Duo.)
The VPN will let you see if there's throttling going on. If Netflix streams better through the VPN, then you carrier is throttling Netflix (and possibly more).
The range extender is fed by a tiny 2.4 gallon tank, so only adds a bit more than 60 miles. Realistically it'll be closer to 40-50 miles since you're not going to want to drive into the gas station on fumes. The reason for this CARB (California Air Resources Board). They set the rules for what defines an EV. For an EV to be linked to a gas engine, the engine cannot drive the wheels directly (it has to drive a generator), and it cannot have more range on gas than on battery. The original i3 had a minimum electric range of 80 miles, so the fuel tank on the i3 with range extender is sized to prevent it from exceeding that range on gasoline.
If the range extender had provided more range, CARB would classify the i3 as a PHEV - partial hybrid electric vehicle, or what's more commonly referred to as a plug-in hybrid. That eliminates it from qualifying for full ZEV credits. Since those credits were the whole reason BMW made the i3, you're stuck with a 2.4 gallon tank.
Nearly all the farm subsidies stem from the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl led to food shortages. Today we pay farmers not to plant crops just to prevent their farmland from being sold and converted into condominiums. The idea is that if a similar ecological disaster strikes, we'll have plenty of reserve farmland which can rapidly be put back into production and sown with seeds.
Likewise, we pay farmers to overproduce. There's no way to know ahead of time what percentage of the crops will fail, so we set a target of growing enough crops that even if there's a worst-case crop failure (e.g. devastating cold snap in late Spring), there will still be enough crops to feed the entire country. Of course when no crop failure happens, we suddenly have more food than we need. Left to normal supply/demand economics, this would cause the price of these crops to crater, and farmers would go out of business. So instead the government sets a guaranteed price before the season. It buys all the crops thus ensuring the farmers stay in business. Then it sells that food to wholesalers and distributors at a loss. This is how corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. are subsidized.
That takes care of the economics (keeping the farmers from going bankrupt). But there's still a discrepancy between supply and demand. Because we overproduced, the government is left with a bunch of food which it can't sell. Rather than let it rot in silos, the government has to come up with other uses for it. A lot of it becomes food for foreign aid (which kills the economy for local farmers overseas, but that's another story). Some of the corn gets turned into high fructose corn syrup, to reduce our dependence on imported sugar cane (which only likes to grow in tropical climates).
And in the 1970s during the Arab Oil Embargo, some clever person said why don't we turn some of that extra food into fuel? You see, this is excess corn and soybeans we're talking about. The cost to grow the crop has already been paid - it's a sunk cost. Anything useful you can do with it is better than letting it rot in silos, as long as the added cost (i.e. excluding the cost of growing the crop) is less than the benefit of the use. For the biofuel program to make economic sense, only the cost of converting it into ethanol or biodiesel has to be less than the market price for gasoline or diesel. The feedstock (corn or soybeans) is essentially free.
That's how it began. Then the agriculture industry got a hold of the idea and lobbied for laws which mandated growing crops for the express purpose of converting them into biofuels. So now we're no longer talking about excess corn and soybeans. We're talking about corn and soybeans which were grown with the sole intent of turning them into ethanol and biodiesel. When you do that, suddenly the cost of growing the crop is no longer a sunk cost, and the economic cost of the program is the conversion cost plus the cost to grow the crop. And it becomes a money-wasting program. These programs need to be scaled back to what they originally were - a use for excess crops grown because of our food subsidies.
Like ethanol, biodiesel has its uses. Ethanol is hygroscopic (likes to absorb water). So adding a little ethanol to gasoline (but nowhere near the 10% we use) helps prevent water from building up in storage tanks. Likewise, the refining process which produces ultra low-sulfur diesel removes much of the natural lubricity in the fuel. Adding a small amount of biodiesel to the tank is a good way to get it back, helping reduce engine wear, reducing maintenance costs and improving engine lifespan. But the programs need to be scaled back to only use excess crops, with enough R&D on the process so they can be ramped up quickly if/when we hit peak oil.
The tide of secondhand clothes keeps growing even as the markets to reuse them are disappearing. From an environmental standpoint, that's a big problem.
Most of the clothes I buy are 100% cotton. Can't you just shred cotton, wool, linen, silk, rayon, etc. clothes and scatter the bits into the wind? They're natural fibers. That's what would've happened to the material anyway if they hadn't been turned into a textile. These things have been growing and dying for millions of years, and we're not buried up to our ears in them. So I assume bacteria are able to decompose them and re-enter the natural food cycles.
Slashdot Mirror
(Discrepancy with the OECD stats is due to being from different years, and the OECD stats including post-secondary non-tertiary education, while the NCES stats are for only K-12).
Spending per student has about doubled in inflation-adjusted dollars over the last 40 years. and tripled since the 1960s. It peaked around 2007, and the people trying to get even more money put into education have been abusing that by using 2007 as the start of their spending graphs.
Where is all the money going? I don't have time to find it again, but the Education Department's own stats are contradictory. If you take the amount of spending it lists in teacher non-salary benefits, and divide it by the number of teachers they give, it ends up something like $50k/yr per teacher. What's going on is the number of non-teaching administrators has exploded since 1970, far outpacing the growth in number of students. These administrators have been hiding it by shifting some of their salary expenses into those of teachers in the stats. Every time education receives a spending increase, the administrators sop up most of it and let only a trickle get through to teachers. Every time education receives a spending cut, these administrators pass it all on directly to the teachers and students, while protecting their own jobs and salaries. As a result, the teachers are constantly complaining of not having enough money despite the huge increases in education spending over the decades.
The ISS was only designed with a 15 year life expectancy. It is currently about 18 years old (some modules are older, some newer), and by 2025 it'll be 25 years old. NASA figures the absolute deadline is 2028. So 2025 is a good retirement date if you want a safety margin. It's commensurate with a previous NASA study which green-lighted keeping it operational until 2024.
Discussion should be focused on what comes next. Not on how to keep the ISS flying. The Space Shuttle was retired for the same reason - its components were designed with only a max 30 year lifespan in mind. Retrofitting it for longer service would've involved replacing all these parts. And if you're going to do that, you might as well design something completely new that takes advantage of new technology that's been developed in the previous 20+ years.
Only if the government has decided that it can be sued for that issue. Sovereign immunity starts off absolute, and exceptions are only allowed when the government itself decides to allow them.
Since New Zealand is part of the British Commonwealth, they share the UK's common law which includes sovereign immunity. So I too am curious if the kiwi government has allowed themselves to be sued in this manner.
The display of an LCD is extremely power-thrifty. The old digital watches (with LCD displays) could run for over the year on a single button cell battery. That corresponds to a power draw of about 0.01 mW.
It's the backlight which consumes huge amounts of power, not the LCD itself.
That's not to dismiss ePaper - it doesn't need to be refreshed. It only consumes power when you're changing the image. LCDs need to be refreshed to maintain an image, and when you have pixels arranged in a grid the rows need to be addressed in sequence, which is going to take more power than more limited LCDs like an old digital watch display. But likewise if you're using ePaper to display a clock face, then it too is going to have be refreshed (either once a second or once a minute).
Fitbit didn't buy Pebble, they only bought the IP. Your Pebble products were discontinued because Pebble went bankrupt. Nothing to do with Fitbit.
Fitbit is keeping Pebble's ecosystem going until mid-2018 despite having no obligation to do so. If Fitbit (or anyone else) hadn't bought Pebble's IP, you would've lost support and the ecosystem when Pebble shut down in Dec 2016. If people persist in blaming Fitbit for "killing" Pebble, next time a popular company goes bankrupt the buyer will probably just buy the IP and let the old product lines die then and there just to avoid the negative stigma from misinformed customers.
If you want to blame someone for the fiasco, blame Pebble's management who let the situation become so bad before seeking buyers, that the company had accrued so much debt that nobody wanted to buy the company outright (debt > assets) and keep the product lines going..
The conspiracy theorist response would be that Microsoft already got most of the data they wanted (which programs you use, how often you use them, how big your porn collection is, etc). Now that they've built up profiles for most of their customers, they can scale back the telemetry, then reveal what they're collecting to the public. And this amounts to them claiming, "See? We aren't collecting any personal info.... [whispered to themselves: anymore...]"
Even fictional visual depictions of child porn are illegal.
If it looks like a child and is porn, it's illegal. So "I thought it was fake" doesn't work as an excuse. The reasoning for this is that fictional depictions of child porn could create demand for more of it, which in turn could result in someone exploiting kids to make real child porn.
Also note that in general, you have the right to control your own image. As such, if someone were to use said software to generate porn that looks like you and distribute it, they would be in violation of your personality rights. At the very least you could get them to stop distributing it. At the most you could sue them for damages. The only loophole is that many countries do not recognize personality rights for dead people. So you might be able to get away with generating and distributing fake porn of dead celebrities.
Spending on education is up.
Non-defense R&D spending is up.
Corporations spend roughly twice as much money on R&D as the government.
The last major tax cut was 15 years ago. The drop in tax revenue in the last decade was due to the recession following the collapse of the housing bubble. Currently, tax revenue is back up to "normal" levels (if you define the highest it's ever been historically as "normal").
What's busting the budget is a refusal to cut spending to match revenue (notice the trendline for tax receipts is flat, while the trendline for spending is climbing). This is primarily driven by growth of entitlement programs. The CBO has been warning us about that since at least 1998 (when I started reading the CBO reports).
And before you claim we should balance the budget by paying more taxes, consider that the tax burden in the U.S. is already among the highest in the world. People claiming U.S. taxes are low usually only look at Federal taxes, and fail to account for state and local taxes. U.S. tax burden is the third highest of the 20 largest economies in the world (only France and Italy have a higher tax burden). That's right, Americans pay more taxes (as percent of GDP) than socialist countries like Canada, the UK, Germany.
Summary even states that the main reason the U.S. dropped was because of low percentage of STEM college graduates.
Not having a Twitter account is a badge of honor.
Having a Twitter account but not knowing your password is a badge of shame. It most likely means you set the app to remember your password so you don't have to type it in every time to login. Meaning anyone you lend your phone to, or steals your phone and manages to bypass its unlock security, can send out tweets in your name.
Apps which access personal or private data should never remember your password, and require a fresh login not only when you start the app, but also if it's been placed in the background for more than a few minutes. If you hate remembering all the different passwords for all your accounts, use a password manager and be sure to remember its password.
This does bring up the issue of why we're considering a message coming from a specific Twitter account to be an official channel. If you instead use something like a two-key digital signature to authenticate your message, then any platform - a personal blog, a slashdot post, even an anonymous message left on the local newspaper's website - could be used as an official channel, since it gives the media a means to validate that the message was sent by you (the person who holds the private key). The media just needs to know where to get the governor's public key. There's no need to use a login/password proprietary to one company.
That's actually relevant. The price you pay for protective regulation is a slower rate of technological development. Short-term, this doesn't mean much and it's "obvious" that the regulations are superior.
But long-term... If clean air laws increase lifespan by x years, but lack of clean air laws allows technology to advance so people end up with more than x years of additional leisure time over their lifetime, which is really better?
I don't honestly know the answer. I don't even know if we can figure out the answer (since we're talking about guessing at what technological breakthroughs will happen in the future). But if you're judging the merit of clean air/water regulations based solely on whether you prefer clean air/water or not, then your analysis is overly simplistic.
China's decision was a bit easier since they were behind the developed world technologically - they could see the beneficial technologies they were going to get in this bargain. They made a decision to sacrifice something like 10 years of life expectancy, in order to make up a 40 year deficit in technology and catch up to first world nations. If they decide to clean up their air and water now, that 10 year sacrifice in lifespan will only have affected one or two generations, while the 40 year jump in technology will benefit all future generations to come. They probably think that bargain was worth it.
And how is that different from before? In the old days people would hang out with friends who were similar to themselves, shielded from exposure to dissenting ideas and having their beliefs reinforced instead of challenged. Now that people are doing the exact same thing online, suddenly it's the end of democracy as we know it? I remember reading an article in the 1980s about how you could guess someone's political affiliation pretty accurately by looking at which magazines they subscribed to. Nothing has really changed except the nature of the subscriptions and the speed of the discourse (instead of forums, we had letters to the editors).
Instead of thinking of this as evidence of democracy failing because of people hanging out in their own cliques, maybe we should think of it as democracy having succeeded in spite of people hanging out in their own cliques. IMHO democracy's strength doesn't come from there being One Truth that everyone has to be convinced to believe in. It come from the incredible diversity of ideas that it can generate precisely because it values everyone and all their differences equally. Other more officious styles of government attempt to stamp out this diversity, meaning on average it takes a longer time for a good idea to percolate up to be noticed and implemented by those in charge - sometimes decades or centuries. With democracy, it can happen in a matter of months if not weeks.
Perhaps the value of that quicker response time outweighs the drawbacks of people isolating themselves in their own cliques with their own insular ideas. That as long as we have a wide diversity of such cliques (who aren't actively trying to kill each other), it doesn't really matter if individuals restrict themselves to just one clique.
The obvious free market choice here is for Nvidia to design a second series of GPUs tailor-made for cryptocurrency mining. Just drop the features mining doesn't need like texture render units, add more of the features mining does need. They already do this sort of parallel product development for gaming cards vs CAD/CAM cards. Although the gaming cards are cheaper than CAD/CAM cards, they have worse performance per dollar at CAD/CAM applications, thus keeping this product differentiation viable.
They're unwilling to do this probably because they aren't confident that cryptocurrency mining will be around that long, and any money they put into parallel development of cards specifically for mining could end up being wasted. If the market were truly free, other GPU manufacturers would step in and take the risk. That's how the market responds to uncertainty - someone willing to take the risk will either be bankrupted by it (if mining turns out to be a fad), or be catapulted to new market dominance (if mining is here for good). Unfortunately, we let Nvidia and AMD/ATI buy up all the smaller GPU manufacturers, leaving us with just two behemoths. If neither of them are willing to take the risk, then that's the end of market forces on this particular issue.
Problem is democracy can offer people free public education and a free press, but it can't force them to take it. That would violate the core tenet of democracy - that the people be free to decide for themselves what's important. And if as you claim these things are essential for a functional democracy, but the people don't want these things, then you've just proven that democracy is untenable.
The problem is something called sampling bias. If you only look for meddling by Russia in only decisions you dislike, then you can only find meddling by Russia only in decisions you dislike. e.g. If your landlord claims your apartment is filthy and is the source of the cockroaches that everyone in the building has been complaining about, and he does an extensive search for roaches in your apartment and finds some, that doesn't prove his claim. For all we know, your apartment could be the cleanest one in the building, and if he'd done the same extensive search on the other apartments he would've found a lot more roaches. But by searching only your unit, he's abusing sampling bias - cherry picking data by only looking in certain places - to try to make it appear as if you're the one at fault.*
If you want to investigate something like this in an objective manner, you need to look for meddling into all big political decisions by all foreign powers. This includes meddling by Facebook (a US corporation) abusing sampling bias to try to discredit the UK Brexit vote via a press release that millions if not tens of millions of Britons will hear about in the news..
* In this case the statistical error (by Facebook) is intentional. But sampling bias can creep in unintentionally too. The classic example is a surveyor tasked with finding out how many hours city residents ride the subway on average, so the city can make better decisions on if subway service should be expanded. He starts off by asking random people on the street how often they ride the subway each week. He grows frustrated that most people don't ride the subway at all, making it difficult for him to gather the required minimum number of positive responses to minimize the margin of error. Then he's struck with inspiration. He'll simply got aboard a subway train and ask the riders how many hours they ride each week. Since everyone on the subway must be subway riders, that'll neatly filter out all the non-riders he's been wasting his time with.
The problem is when you ask people riding on the subway instead of random people on the street, the odds of you encountering a heavy subway user are higher. e.g. If 80% of subway riders ride the subway 1 hour a week, and 20% ride it 10 hours a week, you are 2.5x as likely to sample a 10 hr/wk rider than you are a 1 hr/wk rider simply because they're on the subway a lot longer. So the statistical data you gather this way ends up biased high by your sampling method.
That's a fine concept when you're talking about a majority in a mixed population.
In this case, there's a very sharp geographic delineation between population. The bulk of the population lives in a geographically small region (urban areas). I'm not saying splitting the state is a good idea, but insisting on majority rule for such a huge swath of area with this type of delineation delineation results in the urban areas imposing laws which make sense in only (say) 10% of the state (by land area) upon the remaining 90%.
e.g. California is graduating its minimum wage to $15 by 2023. $15/hr may be the correct amount in urban areas where traditional minimum wage businesses (e.g. fast food restaurants) have a huge population to draw customers from so can absorb the increase in labor expenses relatively easily. But in more sparsely populated rural areas, it could very well mean the difference between a restaurant staying in business or going out of business. A full-time $15/hr job (40 hrs/wk, 50 weeks/yr) is $30k/yr, which is really close to the median household income of some of these rural counties. In those counties, a $15/hr minimum wage may be devastating to the economies of those counties.
Again, I'm not saying this proposal is a good one. Just that the idea of splitting huge states into smaller governing regions is not totally without merit when the majority start imposing laws which simply don't make sense outside of the small areas where the majority lives.
You do realize whether a U.S. territory chooses to become a state is totally under their own control. All they have to do is vote to become a state. Nobody is stopping them from holding that vote and declaring they want to become a state. The only people keeping it from happening is themselves.
Puerto Rico doesn't want to become a state because being merely a territory means Puerto Ricans don't have to pay Federal income tax (unless they work within a U.S. state or for the government). As a territory, they get nearly all the benefits of statehood, without having to pay Federal income tax.
Debt is how much you owe. Deficit is how much you owe this year. It's easy to wipe out a deficit short-term. The tricky part is doing it in ways which work long-term. Simply raising taxes leads to long-term economic slowdown, which reduces tax revenue, meaning you didn't really reduce the deficit, you just shifted it into future years. The net result being long-term increase in debt.
Simply considering only deficit also ignores the value of long-term investments (e.g. infrastructure like roads). A state which spends money fixing up roads spikes their deficit one year, but reduces it for 20-50 years in the future (duration depends on how competent a repair job they did). Likewise, a state which simply stops repairing infrastructure to reduce the deficit for a year is setting itself up for long-term pain in a way which doesn't show up in a simple debt/deficit analysis.
tl;dr - How well a state is managing its budget is a lot more complicated than a simple deficit analysis. Here are several ways to analyze it.
Summary mentions it, but glosses over the consequences of dropping the last significant digit of the heading when making a runway number (e.g. 140 becomes 14). That means that your heading as you're approaching a runway has to be within +/- 5 degrees of the runway number. So no, it'd be stupid to use the number to line up exactly with a runway. You can only use the number as a sanity check - make sure you're in the right ballpark of being lined up. If you should be in the ballpark of being lined up but the runway looks askew, then you're looking at the wrong runway.
Likewise, this means only runways in a narrow range of orientations have to be renumbered. e.g. A runway which used to be 145.5 magnetic and thus 15/33 is now 144.5 magnetic and is renumbered to 14/32. A runway which used to be 147 magnetic is now 146 magnetic and can retain its 15/33 marking. It's not like they're renumbering every runway out there.
The way I'd explain Relativity to a kid is that people always thought that time and space (distance) were universal constants, and everything could be represented assuming those two were constant. If two people are in the same location observing the same thing, but one person is stationary and the other moving, a light beam will appear to be moving at a different speed to the two people.
Einstein showed that the speed of light is what stays constant. Light appears to move at the same speed to both those people in the above example. Space and time themselves warp to make that possible. In this case, by time appearing to pass more slowly for one person.
If this is a typical 9-year old, he'll think "that's weird," go to sleep, and the next day his mind will be back on TV, video games, and sports. If he's atypical, he's going to spend a long time awake thinking about this and have a bunch more questions for you in the morning. Then you can introduce him to all sorts of fun stuff like light clocks, the twin paradox, (the lack of) simultaneity (I especially like the ladder paradox since it's very intuitive and demonstrates how the loss of simultaneity resolves seeming paradoxes).
Your 2FA can be via mobile phone (SMS), another email account, the Google Authenticator app (though I'd recommend Authy instead), or a pre-generated set of recovery keys you can store on your computer (or write down on a post-it and stick it to your monitor if you wish). The latter two don't require giving up any personal info, and are arguably more secure anyway.
I'd recommend Authy instead of Google Authenticator. It's compatible, but adds a bunch of features like multi-device support, a PC client, and encrypted backup of its database. Most importantly, it simply adds a password. If you have Google Authenticator on your phone and you don't have the lockscreen enabled (or you hand your phone to a friend with it unlocked), anyone who picks up/steals the phone can use your Google Authenticator to login to the accounts it's supposed to be protecting. With Authy, you have to enter a passcode or password to be able to use it. It's free if you use it fewer than 100 times per month. (For enterprise use, try Duo.)
The VPN will let you see if there's throttling going on. If Netflix streams better through the VPN, then you carrier is throttling Netflix (and possibly more).
The range extender is fed by a tiny 2.4 gallon tank, so only adds a bit more than 60 miles. Realistically it'll be closer to 40-50 miles since you're not going to want to drive into the gas station on fumes. The reason for this CARB (California Air Resources Board). They set the rules for what defines an EV. For an EV to be linked to a gas engine, the engine cannot drive the wheels directly (it has to drive a generator), and it cannot have more range on gas than on battery. The original i3 had a minimum electric range of 80 miles, so the fuel tank on the i3 with range extender is sized to prevent it from exceeding that range on gasoline.
If the range extender had provided more range, CARB would classify the i3 as a PHEV - partial hybrid electric vehicle, or what's more commonly referred to as a plug-in hybrid. That eliminates it from qualifying for full ZEV credits. Since those credits were the whole reason BMW made the i3, you're stuck with a 2.4 gallon tank.
Nearly all the farm subsidies stem from the Great Depression. The Dust Bowl led to food shortages. Today we pay farmers not to plant crops just to prevent their farmland from being sold and converted into condominiums. The idea is that if a similar ecological disaster strikes, we'll have plenty of reserve farmland which can rapidly be put back into production and sown with seeds.
Likewise, we pay farmers to overproduce. There's no way to know ahead of time what percentage of the crops will fail, so we set a target of growing enough crops that even if there's a worst-case crop failure (e.g. devastating cold snap in late Spring), there will still be enough crops to feed the entire country. Of course when no crop failure happens, we suddenly have more food than we need. Left to normal supply/demand economics, this would cause the price of these crops to crater, and farmers would go out of business. So instead the government sets a guaranteed price before the season. It buys all the crops thus ensuring the farmers stay in business. Then it sells that food to wholesalers and distributors at a loss. This is how corn, wheat, soybeans, etc. are subsidized.
That takes care of the economics (keeping the farmers from going bankrupt). But there's still a discrepancy between supply and demand. Because we overproduced, the government is left with a bunch of food which it can't sell. Rather than let it rot in silos, the government has to come up with other uses for it. A lot of it becomes food for foreign aid (which kills the economy for local farmers overseas, but that's another story). Some of the corn gets turned into high fructose corn syrup, to reduce our dependence on imported sugar cane (which only likes to grow in tropical climates).
And in the 1970s during the Arab Oil Embargo, some clever person said why don't we turn some of that extra food into fuel? You see, this is excess corn and soybeans we're talking about. The cost to grow the crop has already been paid - it's a sunk cost. Anything useful you can do with it is better than letting it rot in silos, as long as the added cost (i.e. excluding the cost of growing the crop) is less than the benefit of the use. For the biofuel program to make economic sense, only the cost of converting it into ethanol or biodiesel has to be less than the market price for gasoline or diesel. The feedstock (corn or soybeans) is essentially free.
That's how it began. Then the agriculture industry got a hold of the idea and lobbied for laws which mandated growing crops for the express purpose of converting them into biofuels. So now we're no longer talking about excess corn and soybeans. We're talking about corn and soybeans which were grown with the sole intent of turning them into ethanol and biodiesel. When you do that, suddenly the cost of growing the crop is no longer a sunk cost, and the economic cost of the program is the conversion cost plus the cost to grow the crop. And it becomes a money-wasting program. These programs need to be scaled back to what they originally were - a use for excess crops grown because of our food subsidies.
Like ethanol, biodiesel has its uses. Ethanol is hygroscopic (likes to absorb water). So adding a little ethanol to gasoline (but nowhere near the 10% we use) helps prevent water from building up in storage tanks. Likewise, the refining process which produces ultra low-sulfur diesel removes much of the natural lubricity in the fuel. Adding a small amount of biodiesel to the tank is a good way to get it back, helping reduce engine wear, reducing maintenance costs and improving engine lifespan. But the programs need to be scaled back to only use excess crops, with enough R&D on the process so they can be ramped up quickly if/when we hit peak oil.
Most of the clothes I buy are 100% cotton. Can't you just shred cotton, wool, linen, silk, rayon, etc. clothes and scatter the bits into the wind? They're natural fibers. That's what would've happened to the material anyway if they hadn't been turned into a textile. These things have been growing and dying for millions of years, and we're not buried up to our ears in them. So I assume bacteria are able to decompose them and re-enter the natural food cycles.