Uber/Lyft is roughly $15 for a 5 mile ride. Figure you live 5 miles from work. That's $30/day, 250 workdays/year, or $7500/yr.
That's squarely in-line with the cost to own a new car. $6354/yr for a small car, $8171/yr for a medium sedan. Except that ownership cost assumes 15k miles/yr driven. The Uber/Lyft cost above is for only 2.5k miles/yr. So if you own, you're paying the same as two 5 mile rides per workday, plus you get to drive 12,500 miles anywhere you want each year for free.
Basically, when you use Uber/Lyft, you're paying for use of a car plus the time and services of a driver. When you own or lease your own car, you're eliminating the cost of having a personal chauffeur.
improvements in air quality had been observed over an area of 10 square kilometers (3.86 square miles) in the city over the past few months and the tower has managed to produce more than 10 million cubic meters (353 million cubic feet) of clean air a day since its launch.
10 million cubic meters spread over 10 square kilometers is (10 million m^3) / (10 km^2) = 1 meter. So over such a wide area, this thing is only cleaning a 1 meter thick layer of air.
1. Apple is held to a higher standard because of their huge profit margins. Typically 20%-25%, vs about 5%-8% for the rest of the consumer electronics industry (net margin). One would hope some of that cornucopia of money consumers hand Apple would be put to use improving working conditions and paying their subcontractors more.
2. Completely agreed that a lot the time this goes completely overboard. e.g. criticizing suicides at Foxconn, when Foxconn had a lower suicide rate than Americans of the same age group.
Only if you have a ridiculously far right notion of what it means to be a republican (which you clearly do). RINO is a pathetic attempt to apply a purity test to a member of the party. By today's standards Reagan would be called a RINO. Heaven forbid someone attempt to have a fruitful negotiation with someone they don't agree with complete. Or *gasp* actually compromise about anything.
For decades the Washington Post kept a database of votes by Congresscritters. If you go to the 113th Senate (the last one before they shut the project down), and click on "Votes with party" it'll sort the Senators by what percentage of the time they vote with their party. You'll find that contrary to what the media has spun for years, it's actually Republicans who are more likely to cross the party aisle and vote with Democrats, not the other way around. I mean sure there are a few blues scattered in there, but the majority of the top of the list of low faithfulness to their party are Republicans. You have to go all the way back to Bush's first term to get a Senate where Democrats were more likely to vote against their own party.
Likewise, if you click it again to sort it by Senators most likely to toe the party line, you end up with a veritable sea of blue. So hate to break it to you but the media has been feeding you fake news. For the last decade and half, most of the moderates have been Republicans. It's Republicans who've been the ones more willing to compromise, Democrats the extremists who always vote with their party. In the Senate at least. The House is more of a mixed bag, but it's a straight majority vote there. The Senate is the one with (until recently) the funny rules where a minority could stall legislation if they got everyone in their party to vote together. Now, consider that Republican Senators got a reputation for doing that all the time, when their voting record clearly shows they didn't (or only did on a few issues they cared deeply about, which is exactly what the fillibuster rules were there for). That sort of deviation between perception and reality usually comes about when the media disproportionately focuses on one or a few rare incidents which are not representative of and contradictory to the whole.
I was wondering how much longer the Washington Post would keep the database running since the data so clearly contradicted the stories they typically ran.
Try pushing the tip of your nose next time you're about to sneeze. On myself and the few people I've tested it on, it suppresses the sneeze. You won't feel that great after, but you won't sneeze.
From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that there would be an "off" switch for a noisy and messy reflex like a sneeze. If you're hiding from a predator and don't have any way to suppress your sneeze, you die.
The Macbook Airs used a decent TN screen (colors don't shift as badly as the worst ones), but it's dim and the color saturation sucks (about 60% sRGB, though some of the earlier models were closer to 50%). I've had to steer numerous artists and photographers away from the MBA because of this. If you do color work and want a Mac, you're pretty much stuck with the Macbook Pros. Apple knows which industries butter their bread, and always gimped the MBA with a poor color screen to prevent it from siphoning sales from the MBP. And when they finally did introduce a MBA-style Mac with a decent screen (the "Macbook" w/ 80% sRGB), they priced it the same as a MBP.
Still, no argument the MBA was a good travel laptop for business and office tasks.
Boeing introduced the 747-8 as token competition to the A380. If there had been no A380, I doubt they ever would've introduced it. More likely they would've updated the 747-400. They'd been doing market research on a full double-deck 747 almost since they first began selling it, and every time it came back that there wasn't enough demand.
Boeing bet on sales shifting towards the long-range twin-engine market (two engines are more efficient than four). That was the entire reason they developed the 777 and 787. Airbus totally missed the boat. Airbus' offering in that role was the A340 - a four-engine plane like the 747. (The A330 could only reach long range with a max passenger capacity of about 250).
The 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market (1534 planes built in 24 years, vs 377 planes built in 20 years). When Boeing introduced the smaller 787, Airbus initially announced plans for the A350 as a 787-competitor. The airlines revolted - what they really wanted was a 777 competitor. They got Airbus to modify the A350 so it slotted in between the 787 and 777.
Given a maxed out configuration of an A380 is 800-odd seats, double that of a 747,
Max capacity of a 747 is over 500. If you're willing to make it all single-class, you could theoretically get over 600 people aboard. That's why the worst single-airliner accident (JAL 123, a 747) had 520 fatalities - nearly as many fatalities as the worst airliner accident in history (collision between two 747s).
Boeing knew this all along. They only made the original 747 a double-decker because they wanted the cargo variant to have a fold-up nose, so it would have the capability to slide fuselage-filling cargo pallets in from the front. This necessitated putting the flight deck above the fuselage. And the aerodynamic bump behind the flight deck provided a little extra space where they could put a few passenger seats.
Once the second deck was fixed into the design, Boeing realized they could greatly increase capacity by making the plane a full double-decker. They continuously pitched this possible variant to the airlines from the 1970s to the 2000s. Every time, their market research said there just wasn't enough market demand to justify making such a large plane. So they never made one. Over the years they increased the length of the upper cabin a bit, but never got enough airline interest to warrant a full double-decker.
Then Airbus came along and insisted there was enough market demand to pay for developing a full double-deck airliner. That's the kind of risk you can take when the governments grant you loan guarantees (Airbus wouldn't have had to pay back the loans for developing the A380 if hadn't generated sufficient sales to pay for itself). As it stands, it looks like the A380 program will just barely break even, so at least the EU citizens won't get stuck with the bill.
You seem to think this is a price comparison between public services and private enterprise. It's not.
It's a price comparison between public service and a private company with a government-granted monopoly. If the government deliberately hands a private company a monopoly, of course its price is going to be higher than if the government provided the service itself.
The whole point of private enterprise is for competition to drive prices down and encourage the rapid development of technological advances. The governments neatly eliminated competition when they granted cable and phone companies local monopolies. This is in fact a perfect example of the damage that screwed up government regulations can do.
CARB (California Air Resources Board) introduced a ZEV mandate. Zero Emissions Vehicle - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market. It requires that a certain percentage of each automaker's sales be ZEVs each year. That percentage increases every year (currently about 2%, supposed to be about 15% by 2025). If an automaker fails to hit that percentage or buy enough credits from a company which has exceeded the percentage, it is banned from selling vehicles in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, that automaker would be banned from selling cars in about a third of the U.S. by population. This is why every automaker has developed an EV - none of them want to be banned from 1/3 of the U.S.
Tesla is actually subsidized by this. It always has ZEV credits, so its bottom line is buoyed by selling those to other automakers. That's also why production of the Tesla 3 has been so slow to ramp up. They won't want to produce more of them per year than they're able to sell credits for. If they can't sell the ZEV credit for a Tesla 3, they have to bear the full manufacturing costs for the vehicle themselves.
CARB actually first tried the ZEV mandate in 2000. That's why GM invested half a billion dollars developing the EV-1. Come late 1999, GM was the only automaker with a viable vehicle which could meet the ZEV mandate. They stood to make billions back selling the ZEV credits and licensing the technology to other car companies. But at the last minute the other automakers convinced CARB that technology wasn't yet ready to meet the ZEV mandate, and hybrids were the best technical solution for now. GM destroying all the EV-1s makes a lot more sense when you put it in this context. Overnight CARB turned GM's half billion dollar investment from a gold mine into money down the toilet, then had the temerity to ask GM if it could share the technology with California (so it could be given to other automakers). It's no wonder GM destroyed the EV-1s and buried the R&D so CARB couldn't get their hands on it.
Do note that this means whether or not EVs are economically viable remains to be seen (whether other automakers are feet-draggers, or if CARB is just pushing the market into unviable space). The mandate is an arbitrary bureaucrat-fixed percentage, not a market one. So if the market doesn't want to buy enough EVs to meet the mandate, automakers have to cut prices on EVs until enough of them sell (or are leased) to meet the mandate. That's why a couple years ago VW was offering a 3-year lease on an eGolf for $79/mo with no money down - they were short on ZEV credits that year. And that's why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold/leased in California count towards the ZEV mnadate. 2016 and 2017 didn't see as good deals, so EV sales seem closer on track with the ZEV mandate those years. But climbing from 2% to 15% in 7 years is a very steep increase in ZEV sales. If what the market wants deviates from the ZEV mandate, it will show up in the EV discounts. The greater the deviation, the steeper the EV discounts will be.
And before someone points out the large portion of that being taxes, the taxes are what's used to subsidize construction of those new renewable power plants. That's why you really should be using levelized cost to compare the expense of power generation - it takes into account all lifetime costs and eliminates these transients due to unrelated factors, and factors in cost-shifting due to subsidies and over time (loans, interest). The snapshot price of electricity in 1H2017 may actually be skewed high if a lot of new plants were being constructed at the time, which is probably the case.
Methane is a natural byproduct of drilling for oil (it's mixed in with oil, and bubbles out of it as it's pumped up and the pressure drops). If we're not capturing it to burn in a power plant, the oil rig just burns it as it comes up the pipe to avoid the capture and storage costs. So until we cease drilling for oil, capturing the methane and using it to generate electricity is basically free. The acquisition and pollution costs have already been paid for by the oil we use. All the methane costs us is capture, storage, and transportation.
Methane also percolates up through the ground as a part of natural oil seeps. So drilling for oil reduces the number of natural methane seeps by reducing the pressure on oil/methane trapped underground. The bigger concern is the large amount of methane locked up in permafrost and as solid methane hydrates under the ocean floors. Not the tiny amount which is leaked as part of the electricity generating process.
Nuclear is still preferable. But as long as we're drilling for oil, methane is more or less a freebie.
You complain that I'm ignoring underlying demographics and then you do the exact same thing. The gap you point to is entirely explained by the fact that it is MINORITIES (non-whites) and WOMEN who are more likely to receive assistance. These groups happen to generally vote Democrat. Again from TFA: "Beyond politics, equally large or larger gaps emerge in the participation rates of many core social and demographic groups. For example, women were about twice as likely as men (23% vs. 12%) to have received food stamps at some point in their lives. Blacks are about twice as likely as whites to have used this benefit during their lives (31% vs. 15%). Among Hispanics, about 22% say they have collected food stamps."
That's somehwat irrelevant, as it's the votes that define the comparison ("red state" vs "blue state"), not ideology. The only interesting thing you can draw from the ideology bit is that of the 17% of people who identify as conservative and receive food stamps, only 10% vote Republican, and 5% vote Democrat. Which actually matches with the aphorism that Americans are in general fiscally conservative, socially liberal. However, food stamp recipients are still skewed heavily towards Democrats.
Anyhow, the main reason the red state/blue state thing is flawed is because of something called Simpson's Paradox. That's where if you break up on overall data set into subgroups, the trend for every subgroup can contradict the overall trend for all subgroups combined. The best example is probably the 2000 election, where Gore won more votes than Bush. But if you divided those votes by state, Bush won more weighted states and thus won the election).* The same thing is going on here. Red states receive more Federal assistance than blue states. But blue voters receive more assistance than red voters.
If you don't believe me, there's a simple way to disabuse yourself of the notion that red/blue state has anything to do with how individual voters break down in terms of tax contributor or recipient. Consider the following two-state example with three residents per state.
Blue State
Citizen 1 (R) = $200 taxes paid
Citizen 2 (D) = $50 benefits received
Citizen 3 (D) = $100 benefits received
Net taxes = $200 + (-$50) + (-$100) = $50 paid
Red State
Citizen 1 (R) = $50 taxes paid
Citizen 2 (R) = $100 taxes paid
Citizen 3 (D) = $200 benefits received
Net taxes = $50 + $100 + (-$200) = $50 received
In this hypothetical example, every single R voter is a taxpayer, every single D voter is a welfare recipient, yet the Blue state is the net tax contributor, while the Red state is the net recipient.
Quantitatively, what's going on is the comparison takes the tax contributions of all red voters who happen to live in blue states, and incorrectly pushes them into the blue category by attributing them to a blue state. And it takes the assistance receipts of all the blue voters who happen to live in red states, and incorrectly pushes them into the red category by attributing them to a red state. The urban centers have more wealth concentrated in the hands of Republican voters, enough to offset the greater assistance receipts by Democrat voters. But the larger number of Democrat voters pushes the state blue in elections. And that creates the paradox of blue states being net contributors while red states are net recipients, when in fact red voters are net contributors while blue voters are net recipients.
* (I do not use the 2016 election as an example because in 2016 conservative parties in total actually won more popular votes than liberal parties. Clinton beat Trump only if you throw out all the votes for third parties. Gore also won a plurality (largest vote share but less than 50%), but combined with Nader's Green party votes
Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. didn't use money to stop SOPA. They did it by publicizing it with prominent banners and black pages. That publicity and the prospect of being voted out of office is what scared the bejeesus out of the congresscritters trying to push SOPA through. They had to do it that way because they hadn't been doing much lobbying in Washington before then, so the regular political or monetary channels weren't open to them. The only way they could stop SOPA in time was to massively publicize it.
SOPA was the wake-up call for Internet companies that they needed to start playing the political lobbying game. Prior to SOPA (2011), lobbying and campaign contributions by Internet companies was relatively modest. It began to balloon in 2011 - that's when Internet companies learned that if they ignored politics, someone else (Hollywood) would use politics to control them. You can't just ignore politics. You're either the one doing the controlling, or you're the one being controlled. Sad but true.
If it takes you 5 seconds to determine a single email is spam and delete it, then a spammer who sends out 500 million emails has basically cost a cumulative 1 lifetime (79 years) in wasted time.
We also do the same thing for financial (white collar) crime. The lifetime earnings for an average American is about $1.5 million. So by that metric, any white collar criminal who causes more than $1.5 million in damage should automatically get a life sentence. But we have this tendency to spread that cost over everyone, so $1.5 million becomes half a cent per American, and we sweep it under the rug. (To be fair, the same standard is used for non-white collar financial crimes like bank robbery. The harsher sentence is for threatening people working at or customers of the bank, not for stealing the money.)
You've got it backwards. If the customer initiates a chargeback, the credit card company assumes the customer is telling the truth. It's not up to the customer to prove the charge was fraudulent. It's up to the merchant to prove the charge was legit. And the easiest way for a merchant to do that is to send the credit card processor a copy of the signature on the receipt. If the receipt matches the customer's signature on file, case closed - it's not fraud. (If the signature doesn't match or there is no signature, the credit card company may or may not decline the chargeback. Merchants can submit other info - address, phone number, etc. - that are not on the card but which the card issuer has on file. That's why gas station pumps ask you to type in your zip code when you use a credit card. But in my experience as a retail business, any customer chargeback where we weren't able to produce a signed receipt or if the signature was faint or illegible, we automatically lost.)
Merchants want to get rid of signatures because it's what the credit card companies use to shift the cost of fraud onto the merchants. Think about it. There are two possible ways for credit card fraud to happen. Either you gave away/lost your card, or the credit card processor allowed a charge that it shouldn't have. The merchant has no way of knowing if a card is fraudulent. All they see is a card, stick it into the reader, and the machine tells them the transaction was approved or declined. The credit card companies got laws passed which prohibit merchants even from requiring ID before they have to accept a card. They can ask for ID, but it's illegal to refuse a credit card transaction just because the customer doesn't have or doesn't want to show ID. But somehow the credit card companies have managed to make the party which has no control over fraud (merchants) pay for fraud. (The exorbitant interest fees you pay credit card companies pay for delinquent customers, not fraud.)
This is why the state of credit card security is so deplorable. Online banking is very secure. Online bill pay is very secure. Wire transfers are very secure. But credit cards security sucks because the parties which can do something about security (the credit card companies and processors) aren't the ones paying for fraud. So they've had little to no incentive to improve credit card security for decades because it hasn't cost them a dime. The merchants have been paying for all the fraud. And whatever the merchant pays for, you pay for via higher prices.
Chip & PIN has its problems, but it's still much more secure than Chip & Sign. And problems with the current Chip & PIN implementation can easily be fixed without altering the process (just need to modify the algorithm the chip uses).
The SWAT team was told not only that was there already a fatality and a hostage situation, but that the house had been doused in gasoline. So the fact that the victim answered the door in his shorts and apparently unarmed didn't eliminate the perceived danger. It also took flash bangs and tasers out of their toolbox (those can ignite gasoline fumes). Rubber bullets and especially bean bags do not work as well through a glass patio door. They also thought time was a factor as other random occurrences can ignite gasoline fumes. Barriss deliberately manufactured a fictional situation in which the police's "safe-or-urgent" setting was slid all the way to the "urgent" side.
You're trying to analyze the situation as a "police kill an innocent" vs "police don't kill an innocent" trade-off. It's not. It's "police don't kill an innocent" vs "police allow an innocent to be killed" (in a real hostage situation because they're acting too carefully).
No, it's testing a specific aspect of a universal basic income, exactly what you'd want a responsible government to do.
The problem is this test won't tell the government what they want to know. A UBI causes the economy to pivot around the value of the currency. The economy tries to value the UBI according to how much productivity was generated to earn it. Since zero productivity was generated, it tries to value the UBI at zero, which means it devalues the currency (inflation driving the UBI received closer to zero value).
However, this effect is negligible when you only have 2000 people on your UBI. Basically the millions of other taxpayers end up subsidizing the UBI recipients at a fraction of a cent on the Euro. Which means the resulting currency devaluation is only a fraction of a percent - impossible to distinguish from regular inflation.
Totally different story if, say, a quarter of your citizens elect to live off the UBI.
The thing UBI proponents don't seem to get is that while money's value can fluctuate, productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed has to be produced at some point. Consequently, if a UBI causes a significant fraction of people to produce less (quit their jobs and live off the UBI), then overall productivity will decline. There are fewer goods being produced, so those goods will be priced higher (basic supply/demand) - i.e. the value of the currency declines. You can make money out of nothing, but you cannot make productivity (goods and services) out of nothing. Someone has to work to produce those things before someone can consume them.
in the first place. Starting with local legislation, which then gains traction and becomes state legislation, and (if enough people like the idea) eventually leads to federal legislation requiring net neutrality.
Those of you pissed at Ajit Pai have only yourselves to blame. He only had the power to revoke net neutrality because you gleefully supported his predecessor when he implemented net neutrality in what was a total run-around of the legislative process this country is founded on. By allowing Tom Wheeler to set the precedent, YOU gave Ajit Pai the same power..
No single appointed person or group of appointed commissioners should have the power to make decisions with wide-ranging consequences like this. It always should have been implemented via the normal legislative process, with majority votes of elected representatives. It was wrong how Ajit Pai revoked it. It was wrong how Tom Wheeler implemented it.
Implementing it via legislation also makes it a lot harder to revoke. You need (at the Federal level) enough votes in both branches of Congress and a Presidential signature. It can't be changed willy nilly just on the whims of some guy the President appointed.
Before asking what is the best voting system, someone was smart enough to ask if it's even possible to determine what the best voting system is.
The answer is no. If you start by requiring some common sense criteria for what an election should accomplish, it turns out no voting system can meet those requirements. If you rank those criteria in a specific order, it's possible to mathematically calculate which voting system generates "unfair" results more often for that particular ranking of criteria (which is to say, a "worse" system can still sometimes produce a "fairer" result by your predefined standards). But if you change the ranking of the criteria, a different voting system ends up being best and producing a different winner. A clever documentary back in the 1990s even came up with an example where a dozen candidates participated in a mock election whose votes were tallied using a dozen different voting systems, and each voting system produced a different winner (i.e. each candidate won under one voting system).
So you think not raising the price of water and having people dying of dehydration in 3 months is better?
Yours is an all too-common error in reasoning - comparison to a nonexistent alternative. The alternative here isn't everyone has water to drink for as long as they want as you erroneously assume. The alternative here is they run out of water in 3 months, at which point people start dying of thirst. If raising the price of water can stave off that scenario, then it's an improvement. If you can't offer an alternative solution which doesn't involve raising prices, then the "solution" you're voting for is people start dying of thirst in 3 months.
Money is simply a representation of productivity. If not enough potable water is available, then you've got only two choices - increase the cost of water, or decrease consumption of water. The latter may not be possible if the population is growing. If reducing consumption is not possible, then clearly more productivity needs to be shifted into acquiring or generating more water. And that productivity shift will show up as more money being spent on water (be it acquisition or production), thus increasing its price (assuming the system has been operating rationally by acquiring the cheapest water first). If you're concerned about the poor being unable to afford higher-priced water, then you work out some sort of ration allowance system or water purchase assistance subsidy. But these do not alter the fundamental problem that water is currently priced too low for the amount of demand, and must be priced higher in order to increase supply to meet demand. Insisting that prices not increase breaks the economy, and will result in people dying of thirst.
Why would they lower the price while demand is equal or outstripping supply?
It's fundamental economics. When demand exceeds supply, you work on increasing supply. That has the side-effect of decreasing prices. But the increased sales from the larger supply ends up generating greater aggregate profit than if you artificially limit yourself to only the higher-end of the demand pool. It's why Walmart dominates, while Brookstone is a niche market. Or why Apple is relegated to about 5% of the PC market. It's why artificially constraining your supply does not increase your profit - it can raise profit per sale, but lowers aggregate profit.
Apple was able to ride the massive growth wave of mobile devices to temporarily buck this trend. But now that mobile growth is petering out (tablet market has already leveled out), the long-term steady state economics will reassert themselves again. Apple can either lower prices and increase supply, so they can expand their market share and maintain profit. Or they're going to end up as 5% niche players in the phone and tablet market, just like in the PC market.
People applaud at the end of a good movie too, even though nobody who helped make the movie can hear them. (What's more interesting is that I see this behavior in movie theaters, but not when watching at home.)
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Uber/Lyft is roughly $15 for a 5 mile ride. Figure you live 5 miles from work. That's $30/day, 250 workdays/year, or $7500/yr.
That's squarely in-line with the cost to own a new car. $6354/yr for a small car, $8171/yr for a medium sedan. Except that ownership cost assumes 15k miles/yr driven. The Uber/Lyft cost above is for only 2.5k miles/yr. So if you own, you're paying the same as two 5 mile rides per workday, plus you get to drive 12,500 miles anywhere you want each year for free.
Basically, when you use Uber/Lyft, you're paying for use of a car plus the time and services of a driver. When you own or lease your own car, you're eliminating the cost of having a personal chauffeur.
10 million cubic meters spread over 10 square kilometers is (10 million m^3) / (10 km^2) = 1 meter. So over such a wide area, this thing is only cleaning a 1 meter thick layer of air.
1. Apple is held to a higher standard because of their huge profit margins. Typically 20%-25%, vs about 5%-8% for the rest of the consumer electronics industry (net margin). One would hope some of that cornucopia of money consumers hand Apple would be put to use improving working conditions and paying their subcontractors more.
2. Completely agreed that a lot the time this goes completely overboard. e.g. criticizing suicides at Foxconn, when Foxconn had a lower suicide rate than Americans of the same age group.
For decades the Washington Post kept a database of votes by Congresscritters. If you go to the 113th Senate (the last one before they shut the project down), and click on "Votes with party" it'll sort the Senators by what percentage of the time they vote with their party. You'll find that contrary to what the media has spun for years, it's actually Republicans who are more likely to cross the party aisle and vote with Democrats, not the other way around. I mean sure there are a few blues scattered in there, but the majority of the top of the list of low faithfulness to their party are Republicans. You have to go all the way back to Bush's first term to get a Senate where Democrats were more likely to vote against their own party.
Likewise, if you click it again to sort it by Senators most likely to toe the party line, you end up with a veritable sea of blue. So hate to break it to you but the media has been feeding you fake news. For the last decade and half, most of the moderates have been Republicans. It's Republicans who've been the ones more willing to compromise, Democrats the extremists who always vote with their party. In the Senate at least. The House is more of a mixed bag, but it's a straight majority vote there. The Senate is the one with (until recently) the funny rules where a minority could stall legislation if they got everyone in their party to vote together. Now, consider that Republican Senators got a reputation for doing that all the time, when their voting record clearly shows they didn't (or only did on a few issues they cared deeply about, which is exactly what the fillibuster rules were there for). That sort of deviation between perception and reality usually comes about when the media disproportionately focuses on one or a few rare incidents which are not representative of and contradictory to the whole.
I was wondering how much longer the Washington Post would keep the database running since the data so clearly contradicted the stories they typically ran.
Try pushing the tip of your nose next time you're about to sneeze. On myself and the few people I've tested it on, it suppresses the sneeze. You won't feel that great after, but you won't sneeze.
From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense that there would be an "off" switch for a noisy and messy reflex like a sneeze. If you're hiding from a predator and don't have any way to suppress your sneeze, you die.
The Macbook Airs used a decent TN screen (colors don't shift as badly as the worst ones), but it's dim and the color saturation sucks (about 60% sRGB, though some of the earlier models were closer to 50%). I've had to steer numerous artists and photographers away from the MBA because of this. If you do color work and want a Mac, you're pretty much stuck with the Macbook Pros. Apple knows which industries butter their bread, and always gimped the MBA with a poor color screen to prevent it from siphoning sales from the MBP. And when they finally did introduce a MBA-style Mac with a decent screen (the "Macbook" w/ 80% sRGB), they priced it the same as a MBP.
Still, no argument the MBA was a good travel laptop for business and office tasks.
Boeing introduced the 747-8 as token competition to the A380. If there had been no A380, I doubt they ever would've introduced it. More likely they would've updated the 747-400. They'd been doing market research on a full double-deck 747 almost since they first began selling it, and every time it came back that there wasn't enough demand.
Boeing bet on sales shifting towards the long-range twin-engine market (two engines are more efficient than four). That was the entire reason they developed the 777 and 787. Airbus totally missed the boat. Airbus' offering in that role was the A340 - a four-engine plane like the 747. (The A330 could only reach long range with a max passenger capacity of about 250).
The 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market (1534 planes built in 24 years, vs 377 planes built in 20 years). When Boeing introduced the smaller 787, Airbus initially announced plans for the A350 as a 787-competitor. The airlines revolted - what they really wanted was a 777 competitor. They got Airbus to modify the A350 so it slotted in between the 787 and 777.
Max capacity of a 747 is over 500. If you're willing to make it all single-class, you could theoretically get over 600 people aboard. That's why the worst single-airliner accident (JAL 123, a 747) had 520 fatalities - nearly as many fatalities as the worst airliner accident in history (collision between two 747s).
Boeing knew this all along. They only made the original 747 a double-decker because they wanted the cargo variant to have a fold-up nose, so it would have the capability to slide fuselage-filling cargo pallets in from the front. This necessitated putting the flight deck above the fuselage. And the aerodynamic bump behind the flight deck provided a little extra space where they could put a few passenger seats.
Once the second deck was fixed into the design, Boeing realized they could greatly increase capacity by making the plane a full double-decker. They continuously pitched this possible variant to the airlines from the 1970s to the 2000s. Every time, their market research said there just wasn't enough market demand to justify making such a large plane. So they never made one. Over the years they increased the length of the upper cabin a bit, but never got enough airline interest to warrant a full double-decker.
Then Airbus came along and insisted there was enough market demand to pay for developing a full double-deck airliner. That's the kind of risk you can take when the governments grant you loan guarantees (Airbus wouldn't have had to pay back the loans for developing the A380 if hadn't generated sufficient sales to pay for itself). As it stands, it looks like the A380 program will just barely break even, so at least the EU citizens won't get stuck with the bill.
You seem to think this is a price comparison between public services and private enterprise. It's not.
It's a price comparison between public service and a private company with a government-granted monopoly. If the government deliberately hands a private company a monopoly, of course its price is going to be higher than if the government provided the service itself.
The whole point of private enterprise is for competition to drive prices down and encourage the rapid development of technological advances. The governments neatly eliminated competition when they granted cable and phone companies local monopolies. This is in fact a perfect example of the damage that screwed up government regulations can do.
CARB (California Air Resources Board) introduced a ZEV mandate. Zero Emissions Vehicle - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market. It requires that a certain percentage of each automaker's sales be ZEVs each year. That percentage increases every year (currently about 2%, supposed to be about 15% by 2025). If an automaker fails to hit that percentage or buy enough credits from a company which has exceeded the percentage, it is banned from selling vehicles in California. And since about a dozen other states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, that automaker would be banned from selling cars in about a third of the U.S. by population. This is why every automaker has developed an EV - none of them want to be banned from 1/3 of the U.S.
Tesla is actually subsidized by this. It always has ZEV credits, so its bottom line is buoyed by selling those to other automakers. That's also why production of the Tesla 3 has been so slow to ramp up. They won't want to produce more of them per year than they're able to sell credits for. If they can't sell the ZEV credit for a Tesla 3, they have to bear the full manufacturing costs for the vehicle themselves.
CARB actually first tried the ZEV mandate in 2000. That's why GM invested half a billion dollars developing the EV-1. Come late 1999, GM was the only automaker with a viable vehicle which could meet the ZEV mandate. They stood to make billions back selling the ZEV credits and licensing the technology to other car companies. But at the last minute the other automakers convinced CARB that technology wasn't yet ready to meet the ZEV mandate, and hybrids were the best technical solution for now. GM destroying all the EV-1s makes a lot more sense when you put it in this context. Overnight CARB turned GM's half billion dollar investment from a gold mine into money down the toilet, then had the temerity to ask GM if it could share the technology with California (so it could be given to other automakers). It's no wonder GM destroyed the EV-1s and buried the R&D so CARB couldn't get their hands on it.
Do note that this means whether or not EVs are economically viable remains to be seen (whether other automakers are feet-draggers, or if CARB is just pushing the market into unviable space). The mandate is an arbitrary bureaucrat-fixed percentage, not a market one. So if the market doesn't want to buy enough EVs to meet the mandate, automakers have to cut prices on EVs until enough of them sell (or are leased) to meet the mandate. That's why a couple years ago VW was offering a 3-year lease on an eGolf for $79/mo with no money down - they were short on ZEV credits that year. And that's why the best EV deals are in California - only EVs sold/leased in California count towards the ZEV mnadate. 2016 and 2017 didn't see as good deals, so EV sales seem closer on track with the ZEV mandate those years. But climbing from 2% to 15% in 7 years is a very steep increase in ZEV sales. If what the market wants deviates from the ZEV mandate, it will show up in the EV discounts. The greater the deviation, the steeper the EV discounts will be.
Why do people get upset that 1% of the population owns 50% of the world's wealth. And in response they flock to something like bitcoin, where 1000 people or 0.007% owns 40% of the wealth?
Anecdotes are not statistics. The average household electrcity cost In Germany for the first half of 2017 was a little over 30 cents per kWh.
And before someone points out the large portion of that being taxes, the taxes are what's used to subsidize construction of those new renewable power plants. That's why you really should be using levelized cost to compare the expense of power generation - it takes into account all lifetime costs and eliminates these transients due to unrelated factors, and factors in cost-shifting due to subsidies and over time (loans, interest). The snapshot price of electricity in 1H2017 may actually be skewed high if a lot of new plants were being constructed at the time, which is probably the case.
Methane is a natural byproduct of drilling for oil (it's mixed in with oil, and bubbles out of it as it's pumped up and the pressure drops). If we're not capturing it to burn in a power plant, the oil rig just burns it as it comes up the pipe to avoid the capture and storage costs. So until we cease drilling for oil, capturing the methane and using it to generate electricity is basically free. The acquisition and pollution costs have already been paid for by the oil we use. All the methane costs us is capture, storage, and transportation.
Methane also percolates up through the ground as a part of natural oil seeps. So drilling for oil reduces the number of natural methane seeps by reducing the pressure on oil/methane trapped underground. The bigger concern is the large amount of methane locked up in permafrost and as solid methane hydrates under the ocean floors. Not the tiny amount which is leaked as part of the electricity generating process.
Nuclear is still preferable. But as long as we're drilling for oil, methane is more or less a freebie.
That's somehwat irrelevant, as it's the votes that define the comparison ("red state" vs "blue state"), not ideology. The only interesting thing you can draw from the ideology bit is that of the 17% of people who identify as conservative and receive food stamps, only 10% vote Republican, and 5% vote Democrat. Which actually matches with the aphorism that Americans are in general fiscally conservative, socially liberal. However, food stamp recipients are still skewed heavily towards Democrats.
Anyhow, the main reason the red state/blue state thing is flawed is because of something called Simpson's Paradox. That's where if you break up on overall data set into subgroups, the trend for every subgroup can contradict the overall trend for all subgroups combined. The best example is probably the 2000 election, where Gore won more votes than Bush. But if you divided those votes by state, Bush won more weighted states and thus won the election).* The same thing is going on here. Red states receive more Federal assistance than blue states. But blue voters receive more assistance than red voters.
If you don't believe me, there's a simple way to disabuse yourself of the notion that red/blue state has anything to do with how individual voters break down in terms of tax contributor or recipient. Consider the following two-state example with three residents per state.
Blue State
Citizen 1 (R) = $200 taxes paid
Citizen 2 (D) = $50 benefits received
Citizen 3 (D) = $100 benefits received
Net taxes = $200 + (-$50) + (-$100) = $50 paid
Red State
Citizen 1 (R) = $50 taxes paid
Citizen 2 (R) = $100 taxes paid
Citizen 3 (D) = $200 benefits received
Net taxes = $50 + $100 + (-$200) = $50 received
In this hypothetical example, every single R voter is a taxpayer, every single D voter is a welfare recipient, yet the Blue state is the net tax contributor, while the Red state is the net recipient.
Quantitatively, what's going on is the comparison takes the tax contributions of all red voters who happen to live in blue states, and incorrectly pushes them into the blue category by attributing them to a blue state. And it takes the assistance receipts of all the blue voters who happen to live in red states, and incorrectly pushes them into the red category by attributing them to a red state. The urban centers have more wealth concentrated in the hands of Republican voters, enough to offset the greater assistance receipts by Democrat voters. But the larger number of Democrat voters pushes the state blue in elections. And that creates the paradox of blue states being net contributors while red states are net recipients, when in fact red voters are net contributors while blue voters are net recipients.
* (I do not use the 2016 election as an example because in 2016 conservative parties in total actually won more popular votes than liberal parties. Clinton beat Trump only if you throw out all the votes for third parties. Gore also won a plurality (largest vote share but less than 50%), but combined with Nader's Green party votes
Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc. didn't use money to stop SOPA. They did it by publicizing it with prominent banners and black pages. That publicity and the prospect of being voted out of office is what scared the bejeesus out of the congresscritters trying to push SOPA through. They had to do it that way because they hadn't been doing much lobbying in Washington before then, so the regular political or monetary channels weren't open to them. The only way they could stop SOPA in time was to massively publicize it.
SOPA was the wake-up call for Internet companies that they needed to start playing the political lobbying game. Prior to SOPA (2011), lobbying and campaign contributions by Internet companies was relatively modest. It began to balloon in 2011 - that's when Internet companies learned that if they ignored politics, someone else (Hollywood) would use politics to control them. You can't just ignore politics. You're either the one doing the controlling, or you're the one being controlled. Sad but true.
If it takes you 5 seconds to determine a single email is spam and delete it, then a spammer who sends out 500 million emails has basically cost a cumulative 1 lifetime (79 years) in wasted time.
We also do the same thing for financial (white collar) crime. The lifetime earnings for an average American is about $1.5 million. So by that metric, any white collar criminal who causes more than $1.5 million in damage should automatically get a life sentence. But we have this tendency to spread that cost over everyone, so $1.5 million becomes half a cent per American, and we sweep it under the rug. (To be fair, the same standard is used for non-white collar financial crimes like bank robbery. The harsher sentence is for threatening people working at or customers of the bank, not for stealing the money.)
You've got it backwards. If the customer initiates a chargeback, the credit card company assumes the customer is telling the truth. It's not up to the customer to prove the charge was fraudulent. It's up to the merchant to prove the charge was legit. And the easiest way for a merchant to do that is to send the credit card processor a copy of the signature on the receipt. If the receipt matches the customer's signature on file, case closed - it's not fraud. (If the signature doesn't match or there is no signature, the credit card company may or may not decline the chargeback. Merchants can submit other info - address, phone number, etc. - that are not on the card but which the card issuer has on file. That's why gas station pumps ask you to type in your zip code when you use a credit card. But in my experience as a retail business, any customer chargeback where we weren't able to produce a signed receipt or if the signature was faint or illegible, we automatically lost.)
Merchants want to get rid of signatures because it's what the credit card companies use to shift the cost of fraud onto the merchants. Think about it. There are two possible ways for credit card fraud to happen. Either you gave away/lost your card, or the credit card processor allowed a charge that it shouldn't have. The merchant has no way of knowing if a card is fraudulent. All they see is a card, stick it into the reader, and the machine tells them the transaction was approved or declined. The credit card companies got laws passed which prohibit merchants even from requiring ID before they have to accept a card. They can ask for ID, but it's illegal to refuse a credit card transaction just because the customer doesn't have or doesn't want to show ID. But somehow the credit card companies have managed to make the party which has no control over fraud (merchants) pay for fraud. (The exorbitant interest fees you pay credit card companies pay for delinquent customers, not fraud.)
This is why the state of credit card security is so deplorable. Online banking is very secure. Online bill pay is very secure. Wire transfers are very secure. But credit cards security sucks because the parties which can do something about security (the credit card companies and processors) aren't the ones paying for fraud. So they've had little to no incentive to improve credit card security for decades because it hasn't cost them a dime. The merchants have been paying for all the fraud. And whatever the merchant pays for, you pay for via higher prices.
Chip & PIN has its problems, but it's still much more secure than Chip & Sign. And problems with the current Chip & PIN implementation can easily be fixed without altering the process (just need to modify the algorithm the chip uses).
The SWAT team was told not only that was there already a fatality and a hostage situation, but that the house had been doused in gasoline. So the fact that the victim answered the door in his shorts and apparently unarmed didn't eliminate the perceived danger. It also took flash bangs and tasers out of their toolbox (those can ignite gasoline fumes). Rubber bullets and especially bean bags do not work as well through a glass patio door. They also thought time was a factor as other random occurrences can ignite gasoline fumes. Barriss deliberately manufactured a fictional situation in which the police's "safe-or-urgent" setting was slid all the way to the "urgent" side.
You're trying to analyze the situation as a "police kill an innocent" vs "police don't kill an innocent" trade-off. It's not. It's "police don't kill an innocent" vs "police allow an innocent to be killed" (in a real hostage situation because they're acting too carefully).
The problem is this test won't tell the government what they want to know. A UBI causes the economy to pivot around the value of the currency. The economy tries to value the UBI according to how much productivity was generated to earn it. Since zero productivity was generated, it tries to value the UBI at zero, which means it devalues the currency (inflation driving the UBI received closer to zero value).
However, this effect is negligible when you only have 2000 people on your UBI. Basically the millions of other taxpayers end up subsidizing the UBI recipients at a fraction of a cent on the Euro. Which means the resulting currency devaluation is only a fraction of a percent - impossible to distinguish from regular inflation.
Totally different story if, say, a quarter of your citizens elect to live off the UBI.
The thing UBI proponents don't seem to get is that while money's value can fluctuate, productivity is conserved. Everything that's consumed has to be produced at some point. Consequently, if a UBI causes a significant fraction of people to produce less (quit their jobs and live off the UBI), then overall productivity will decline. There are fewer goods being produced, so those goods will be priced higher (basic supply/demand) - i.e. the value of the currency declines. You can make money out of nothing, but you cannot make productivity (goods and services) out of nothing. Someone has to work to produce those things before someone can consume them.
in the first place. Starting with local legislation, which then gains traction and becomes state legislation, and (if enough people like the idea) eventually leads to federal legislation requiring net neutrality.
Those of you pissed at Ajit Pai have only yourselves to blame. He only had the power to revoke net neutrality because you gleefully supported his predecessor when he implemented net neutrality in what was a total run-around of the legislative process this country is founded on. By allowing Tom Wheeler to set the precedent, YOU gave Ajit Pai the same power..
No single appointed person or group of appointed commissioners should have the power to make decisions with wide-ranging consequences like this. It always should have been implemented via the normal legislative process, with majority votes of elected representatives. It was wrong how Ajit Pai revoked it. It was wrong how Tom Wheeler implemented it.
Implementing it via legislation also makes it a lot harder to revoke. You need (at the Federal level) enough votes in both branches of Congress and a Presidential signature. It can't be changed willy nilly just on the whims of some guy the President appointed.
Before asking what is the best voting system, someone was smart enough to ask if it's even possible to determine what the best voting system is.
The answer is no. If you start by requiring some common sense criteria for what an election should accomplish, it turns out no voting system can meet those requirements. If you rank those criteria in a specific order, it's possible to mathematically calculate which voting system generates "unfair" results more often for that particular ranking of criteria (which is to say, a "worse" system can still sometimes produce a "fairer" result by your predefined standards). But if you change the ranking of the criteria, a different voting system ends up being best and producing a different winner. A clever documentary back in the 1990s even came up with an example where a dozen candidates participated in a mock election whose votes were tallied using a dozen different voting systems, and each voting system produced a different winner (i.e. each candidate won under one voting system).
So you think not raising the price of water and having people dying of dehydration in 3 months is better?
Yours is an all too-common error in reasoning - comparison to a nonexistent alternative. The alternative here isn't everyone has water to drink for as long as they want as you erroneously assume. The alternative here is they run out of water in 3 months, at which point people start dying of thirst. If raising the price of water can stave off that scenario, then it's an improvement. If you can't offer an alternative solution which doesn't involve raising prices, then the "solution" you're voting for is people start dying of thirst in 3 months.
Money is simply a representation of productivity. If not enough potable water is available, then you've got only two choices - increase the cost of water, or decrease consumption of water. The latter may not be possible if the population is growing. If reducing consumption is not possible, then clearly more productivity needs to be shifted into acquiring or generating more water. And that productivity shift will show up as more money being spent on water (be it acquisition or production), thus increasing its price (assuming the system has been operating rationally by acquiring the cheapest water first). If you're concerned about the poor being unable to afford higher-priced water, then you work out some sort of ration allowance system or water purchase assistance subsidy. But these do not alter the fundamental problem that water is currently priced too low for the amount of demand, and must be priced higher in order to increase supply to meet demand. Insisting that prices not increase breaks the economy, and will result in people dying of thirst.
It's fundamental economics. When demand exceeds supply, you work on increasing supply. That has the side-effect of decreasing prices. But the increased sales from the larger supply ends up generating greater aggregate profit than if you artificially limit yourself to only the higher-end of the demand pool. It's why Walmart dominates, while Brookstone is a niche market. Or why Apple is relegated to about 5% of the PC market. It's why artificially constraining your supply does not increase your profit - it can raise profit per sale, but lowers aggregate profit.
Apple was able to ride the massive growth wave of mobile devices to temporarily buck this trend. But now that mobile growth is petering out (tablet market has already leveled out), the long-term steady state economics will reassert themselves again. Apple can either lower prices and increase supply, so they can expand their market share and maintain profit. Or they're going to end up as 5% niche players in the phone and tablet market, just like in the PC market.
People applaud at the end of a good movie too, even though nobody who helped make the movie can hear them. (What's more interesting is that I see this behavior in movie theaters, but not when watching at home.)