My workplace only has Verizon (now Frontier) as a choice for Internet. They are charging $35/mo for 768 kbps down / 128 kbps up DSL, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 kbps up, and it isn't even very reliable. My home Internet (Cox-only area) is $90/mo for 200 Mbps down / 10 Mbps up. Frankly I don't need 200 Mbps down, but could use more than 10 Mbps up (for when I VPN into my home network). Net neutrality doesn't fix ISPs charging you an arm and a leg because they have a government-granted monopoly in your area.
An AT&T rep knocked on my door a couple weeks ago to announce they were rolling out fiber to my area, and were expecting pricing to be around $45/mo. Competition fixes both abusive pricing and throttling. If my ISP decides to throttle Netflix for not paying them, and I have a choice of ISPs, all I have to do is switch ISPs to one which doesn't throttle Netflix. The problem net neutrality is trying to solve is entirely caused by these government-granted cable/phone monopolies. (AT&T is only able to offer broadband in my area because they're the local phone monopoly.)
So I would rather have the solution which eliminates both artificial throttling and abusing pricing - competition. The gas and power utilities even provide the model for doing this. You hire a company to build and maintain the distribution wires or pipes going to each home. That company is paid to maintain those lines/pipes, but is prohibited from selling service (gas, electricity, Internet) over them. Instead, they sell access rights to those lines/pipes (at a fixed price regulated by a Public Utilities Commission) to other companies which provide the service. This lets hundreds or even thousands of companies compete against each other to sell you gas, electricity, or Internet service. Thus insuring anyone trying to price gouge you or degrade your service as part of their petty extortion schemes simply puts themselves out of business.
It's not possible recall all the processors that ever existed. Society doesn't have the resources even to think about such a thing.
A recall actually wouldn't be that expensive for Intel. Most CPUs and SoCs with the same die size as Intel's CPUs sell for only around $20. The $100 to several $1000 Intel is able to command for their CPUs is due to marketing and them being top dog. The material cost of the Intel* CPUs themselves is only a tiny fraction of their retail price. (Which raises the possibility of Intel doing a recall, taking a charge for it on their books based on the retail price, and getting a tax deduction for the "loss" which exceeds the manufacturing cost of the recall.)
The bigger expense would be in the time to manufacture the CPUs (it would tie up their fabs for years) and the labor of actually replacing them. Desktops are pretty easy, but laptops with soldered BGA CPUs would be difficult to impossible. Another problem is that there simply is no performance-equivalent replacement for the highest-end CPUs. Any fix severely curtails performance, so a fixed CPU which has the same performance as a high-end pre-fix CPU may not exist for for several more years.
* (We're pretty much only talking about Meltdown and Intel. From what I've been reading, the fixes for the other bugs affecting non-Intel CPUs result in minor to negligible performance hits. Which also makes me think I haven't been giving AMD the respect they deserve. I'd assumed they hadn't been able to match Intel's performance because they simply weren't as good at designing processors. Now it appears a large part of the reason was because they refused to follow Intel in doing something that compromised security to generate more performance.)
That's mostly correct. 2 engines are more efficient than 4 engines (for the same amount of total thrust). That's why the 777 beat the A340 into a bloody pulp in the market, and why the airlines demanded Airbus redesign the A350 when it was first proposed. Airbus tried to make it a 787 competitor, but the airlines really wanted a 777 competitor, so convinced Airbus to make the A350 larger (only the largest capacity 787 matches the smallest capacity A350). Likewise, 1 engine is more efficient than 2 (leaving me to wonder if in the future, airliners will operate on a single engine during cruise, with the second engine used only for takeoff and as a backup).
However, back in the 1960s and 1970s when the 747 was introduced, there were some other factors favoring 4 engines.
This was pre-Arab oil embargo. Fuel didn't cost as much, so fuel efficiency wasn't as high a priority.
Engine design hadn't progressed to the point where you could generate enough thrust for such a large plane with just 2 engines. Heck, the DC-8 and 707 (introduced just a decade before the 747) were 4-engined planes despite having the passenger capacity of a modern 737 or A320. And the much smaller 727 was three engines. The big technological leap was the transition from a turbojet to a turbofan. A turbojet relies on throwing the exhaust gases backward at high velocity to generate thrust. A turbofan uses part of the exhaust gases to spin a ducted fan blade which pushes non-exhaust air backward to generate thrust. Basically the same thing as a turboprop (a propeller driven by a jet engine, instead of a piston engine), except the propeller is ducted. IIRC, nowadays close to 90% of the thrust comes from the bypass fans, only about 10% from the exhaust jet.
In older days, many airport facilities weren't as modernized. A plane which suffered an engine failure might not be able to have it repaired at the destination. It would have to fly with the failed engine back to an airport with a modern repair facility. You can't do that with a twin-engine plane without violating safety regulations, but you can with a 4-engine plane. Pilots of the DC-10 and L1011 (tri-jets) would frequently leave the #2 engine (located up in the tail) running at certain airports which didn't have the facilities to jump-start that engine if the built-in starter failed. Nowadays, most airports even in developing countries are modernized enough to maintain and repair most engines, at least well enough for the plane to fly to a better repair facility on two engines.
Older airport runways weren't as luxuriously long as at modern airports. In the event a plane has a reject (abort) a takeoff due to an engine failure, a twin engine plane only has 50% of its thrust available for reversing and slowing the plane down. A 4-engine plane has 75% of its thrust available for slowing down, so can safely take off on a shorter runway.
As you mention, ETOPS, or how far a twin-engine plane could safely fly with one failed engine, didn't exist back then. It was simply considered too dangerous to fly a twin-engine passenger plane out past its glide range over the sea.
The W3C made themselves irrelevant when they took 12 years to update from HTML 4 (1999) to HTML 5 (2011 to begin finalizing the spec, it didn't become official until 2014).
They're the ones responsible for Adobe Flash (nee Macromedia Flash) becoming the de facto standard for multimedia on the web. Web designers begged for a way to implement things like in-line video and audio, and dynamic web menus via HTML. The W3C refused to add those features. So web designers looked for other ways to do it. And lo and behold there was this animation tool called Flash would could be made to do those things. Flash was never intended to become a multimedia web standard. Its designers only made it so you could transmit animated videos over low-bandwidth dialup links, so security wasn't high on their priority list.
The demand for these features was so palpable that web browsers were implementing proposed HTML 5 features as early as 2009, while the W3C was taking their sweet time. The W3C taught everyone that you'll die of old age (in Internet terms) if you wait for the W3C. So if you want a new feature in HTML, just implement it yourself and if enough other people want it they'll jump on board with you. And it'll become the de facto standard. No need to wait for the W3C.
To understand why, you have to understand the economics of EVs. The real economics - not the "EV sales are rising because more people want them" rose-tinted version its proponents like to believe.
EV sales are taking off because of CARB (California Air Resources Board). They have a ZEV mandate (zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market). Beginning in 2013 or 2014, CARB required a certain percentage of each manufacturer's vehicle sales to be ZEVs or PZEVs (partial ZEVs - basically plug-in hybrids). The percentage goes up every year. The formula is a bit complex but it's about 2% ZEVs for 2018, and supposed to reach over 15% by 2025.
If a manufacturer fails to reach this percentage, the manufacturer must buy ZEV credits from another manufacturer which exceeded its required quota. This is what keeps Tesla afloat. Since they only sell ZEVs, they always have excess credits which they sell to other manufacturers who didn't sell enough ZEVs. That's right - if you buy an ICE vehicle, you are likely subsidizing someone buying a $70,000 Tesla. This is also why Tesla is in no hurry to ramp up Tesla 3 production. They don't want to flood the ZEV credit market - that would devalue their own credits. So they're going to ramp up production just barely fast enough to keep up with how many credits other manufacturers need to buy to comply with CARB's requirement.
If the manufacturer fails to sell enough EVs or buy enough ZEV credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules, that ban would extend to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. No manufacturer wants to be banned from that huge chunk of the market, so they do whatever they can to sell enough EVs to comply with CARB's ZEV mandate. This means sales, discounts, incentives, whatever it takes to get however many EVs they need into buyers' hands to satisfy CARB's requirements. This is why the EV deals are better in California than in other states - CARB only counts EVs which are sold in California. So California is where automakers offer the biggest EV incentives. I almost pulled the trigger on a 3-year e-Golf lease in 2016 for $500 down, $79/mo in Los Angeles (the Bay Area had zero down, $79/mo available).
Since EVs are not actually popular with buyers (at least not at the percentage the ZEV mandate requires), this means the manufacturers have to sell the vehicles at below true market value to generate sufficient sales (sometimes even below manufacturing cost). If they're going to do this, leasing it is preferable to selling it. With a sale, they've lost the entire manufacturing cost of the vehicle. With a lease, they at least get the materials for the vehicle back at the end, which they can then reuse or recycle. And if the blue book value of the EV is less at the end of the lease than was projected, they can write off the difference and get a tax deduction for the loss. Leasing also allows anyone to take advantage of the full $7500 federal tax credit. Being a tax credit, you have to owe at least $7500 in income taxes to take full advantage of it. Based on IRS tax stats, this means the buyer needs to make more than about $70,000/yr to take advantage of the full tax credit. But if you lease it, the tax credit goes to the car manufacturer, who pays a lot more than $7500 in taxes each year. So they can take advantage of the full credit and pass it on to the buyer. That means the real price for a leased EV for anyone making less than $70,000/yr is often less than for a purchased EV.
All this is why the blue book value of a used EV is so low. The ZEV mandate only applies to new vehicle sales, not used EVs. The incentives lower the price, effectively causing more new EVs to be sold or leased than would've at the correct market p
"Microsoft Edge is up to 48 percent faster than Google Chrome," Microsoft says in one of the 30-second ads
"Up to" is a useless marketing term when only a single benchmark is given. Edge could be slower than Chrome at everything except one test, and you could still truthfully state that it was "up to 48%" faster than Chrome.
For a one-line statement like that to be meaningful, it has to refer to average speed, or "at least".
I am not really sure why there are people here that think it is ok for Spotify to sell a product they are not paying for.
I'm pretty ambivalent towards this (not really a big music fan). But the way I see it, as long as the music industry is trying sell you a product that they are not paying for, then it seems to me that turnabout is fair play.
The copyright bargain is that content creators get a temporary copyright on their work in order to stoke a permanent increase in the rate at which such works enter the public domain (by incentivizing the creation of such works and thus increasing the rate at which they're created). i.e. The payment for their right to sell to you their works, is that those works must eventually be introduced into the public domain. If those content creators finagle the law so their works are no longer entering the public domain, or that it takes so long for said works to enter the public domain that they have no value by the time that happens (1897's greatest hits anyone?), then they themselves have broken the copyright bargain. And as such their copyright protections are forfeit.
Contract law 101. Both parties to the contract must give up something of value to each other in the exchange. If only one side is giving something up, then the contract is not binding, and thus invalid, and there is no copyright protection.
Couldn't the Iranian government just claim they detected foreign countries attempting to influence last year's election via social media, and use that as U.S.-proof justification for blocking access to social media sites? I mean I know it'd be ridiculous. But that's why censorship is a very slippery slope.
If we applied to other programs the same standard opponents of voter ID cards use (it was abused in the past, so it must never be implemented), we'd have to eliminate pretty much every government program in existence including social security, medicare, food stamps, public housing, unemployment insurance. Such an uncompromising position ("anywhere it's been implemented") is nothing more than playing the race card.
Wages are an expense, so increasing wages already decreases corporate taxes. In theory, if a company distributed the entirety of its profit to its employees as bonuses, it would have zero profit and therefore have to pay no corporate taxes (which are a percentage of profit).
The most direct impact of corporate taxes are on shareholder dividends, since that's basically distribution of profit to shareholders.* Increase the corporate tax, decrease the shareholder dividend. For a company existing in a single country, this is simple - just eliminate the corporate tax and crank up the income tax rate on dividends. Then no matter what sorts of bookkeeping shenanigans the company plays, the tax is still collected since at some point the money has to move from the company to the shareholders. For multi-national companies, this is more complicated since the shareholders may not be subject to income tax in the same countries where the sales were made.
But if maintaining the tax in the country of sale is your concern, you can simply shift the tax into a sales tax. This has the same effect as a corporate tax or income tax on dividends.
Say without taxes an item which costs $80 to produce is sold for $100, $20 of which is profit that is distributed to the shareholders.
If you implement a 50% corporate tax, then $10 of that profit goes to the shareholders, $10 to the government. If the shareholders decide they want to maintain the $20 dividend per product sold, then they would increase the product's price to $120. Now the customer pays $120, there's $40 profit, $20 goes to the government, $20 is distributed to the shareholders.
If you implement a 20% sales tax, then the customer pays $120 for the $100 product. $20 goes to the government, $20 remains as profit for distribution to the shareholders. Exactly the same as the 50% corporate tax case.
The difference being that in the 50% corporate tax case, shareholders can reduce their tax (on profit) by charging expenses to an overseas subsidiary, which shifts the money overseas without paying taxes on it. OTOH the 20% sales tax generates the same tax revenue, except the shareholders can't reduce the tax by tricky bookkeeping. A $100 product was sold and $20 in taxes collected, which must go to the local government.
That's what the OP is getting at. Distinguishing between sales tax, corporate tax, and personal income tax is economic homeopathy. There is no difference. You're attributing sentimentality based on which stage of the economic transaction the taxes are extracted at, when the money doesn't remember, the math doesn't care, and the net end result is the same. Since the end results are the same, and since it's ridiculously difficult to extract taxes consistently from a multinational corporation, instead of trying to extract taxes from their profit you should extract taxes from other stages of their economic transactions - use a sales tax.
* (It's a bit different in Google's case since they don't pay dividends. They keep all their profit as retained earnings. Still, there's no problem with not taxing this if you also tax interest income. The tax-free retained earnings will actually decline in value due to inflation, and there's probably more profitable places for them to spend the money than an interest-bearing savings account. And as before, if you want the taxes to remain in the country where the transaction occurred, a sales tax is still does that. Any subsequent retained earnings is money that you weren't going to tax anyway, so you shouldn't care what Google does with it. Unless they use it for more economic activity in your country, like purchasing equipment or expanding operations or investing in stocks. And you can tax that independently of the original economic transaction.)
The fundamental "problem" is that taxation is not a natural state. It's an artificial construct created to divert money from the private sector to government coffers (in a method deemed "fair" by the government - the people in democracies, whatever the ruler wants in dictatorships).
Since it's artificial and not natural, taxation can never be foolproof. Short of the government completely taking over the economy (which is what Communism tried to do), there will always be loopholes and workarounds. It's a game of whack-a-mole. Or my preferred analogy is a tube of toothpaste under too much pressure. If it's leaking out of a hole and you patch the hole, the pressure will just find the next weakest spot and start leaking out of that. The more successful an economy (or portion of the economy is), the greater the pressure, and the more likely it is to find a new hole for avoiding taxes.
That's why I've advocated not taxing corporate profit. Corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries, which substantially complicates collecting taxes from them. If you were to instead implement the tax as something contained entirely within a single country - like a sales tax - it would accomplish the exact same thing. Company sells an item and collects $x from the customer, a percentage of which is diverted to the government as taxes. (The money doesn't "remember" which stage of the transaction it was diverted to the government at, so it doesn't matter if it's diverted at the time of sale or at a later point.) If you implement it as a tax on profit, that gives the company the opportunity to water down the income and shift it overseas by charging itself additional expenses from offshore subsidiaries. If you implement it as a sales tax, there's no way to remove it from the country of sale it since it's a fixed percentage of every sale.
(And no this doesn't shift the tax burden from the corporation to the buyer. Corporations don't pay taxes because they don't generate productivity - their employees and shareholders do, and their customers generate productivity using the products they buy. Any corporate tax you implement is simply shifted to customers as higher prices, to employees as lower wages, and to shareholders as reduced dividends. If you compare with the same initial state - no taxes - adding sales tax produces the same mathematical result as the shareholders deciding to increase the price in order to maintain their dividends after a corporate tax is implemented. Except the sales tax can't be avoided, while the corporate tax can be by using tricky bookkeeping to shift the money overseas.)
Just to give a window into what it's like from the other side, when I was managing a company with 60 employees, we had to fire one of them. He was head of his department and we were pretty sure he was embezzling (his replacement eventually confirmed this when he went through a half year of purchase orders and compared to what was in inventory). About a month later I got a phone call from the company he'd applied for a job at - he had given me as a reference.
I wasn't sure what I was allowed to say so gave the excuse that I was way too busy and could they please call back the next day. We had unlimited phone access to employment lawyers as part of our employment liability insurance, so I called them up and explained the situation. They told me flat out that unless we had rock-solid proof he was embezzling, under no circumstances should I state that as the reason we had let him go. I couldn't mention any of our suspicions or circumstantial evidence either. We couldn't (or shouldn't) mention any negatives in his reference unless we had documentation on file to back it up (like signed formal reprimands - I had always wondered why we had to have 2 other people in the room with the employee when we gave a reprimand, and why the employee was required to sign them).
The next day when they called back I had to water down our experience with him as "he didn't fit well with the company." I stammered and hesitated while saying it, and I think I succeeded in getting the message across that there was a lot more to it than that but I wasn't legally allowed to say it. I understand now why there's an art to double entendres and backhanded compliments when it comes to job references.
So the distinguishing factor isn't low-level vs high-level employee. It's "differences" when it's on the record and the company doesn't have rock-solid proof (i.e. they could be sued for libel or slander). It's "burning bridges" when it's off the record or the company has rock-solid proof. High-level employees just get the "differences" explanation more often because they're better at covering their butts than low-level employees.
Cardboard (and paper) should be thrown in the trash. Our problem with climate change stems from pumping hydrocarbons (coal/oil/gas) out of the ground, and burning them. This combines the carbon with atmospheric oxygen to create carbon dioxide (and releases energy). The CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
Trees pull CO2 out of the air and use sunlight to convert it back into hydrocarbons (sugars, eventually linked together to form cellulose). When you throw paper and cardboard into the trash, it ends up in a landfill. i.e. Back underground where we pumped the carbon out of in the first place. Some biological decomposition happens in landfills (we pump methane out of landfills). But core samples drilled into landfills has turned up bits of newspaper from the 1800s, still legible, indicating the carbon has for the most part been successfully sequestered underground.
If you eliminate recycling of paper and cardboard, this increases the price of paper. Trees have to be cut down to create new paper and cardboard, and the higher price creates an incentive to re-seed the forests where these trees were cut down, so they can be harvested again in a few decades. These additional trees pull even more CO2 out of the atmosphere. We could even get into a situation where the slash and burn practices in the Amazon are reversed - it could become more valuable to plant trees to replace those which were clear-cut.
Recycling cardboard and paper is bad for the environment.
Existing works should've continued to be subject to their original copyright term. The new copyright duration should've only applied to new works - things created after the copyright extension act was passed. Kinda the inverse of grandfathering and ex post facto laws. This prevents an immediate beneficiary of the change to the law from unduly influencing the process of changing the law. Everyone takes a step back and considers the entire ramifications of the change to the law, instead of considering only the tiny immediate effect of the change.
The rationale for this is that the whole point of copyright is to encourage the creation of artistic works. Since the pre-existing work has already been made, copyright has already has served its function and encouraged its creation. So there is nothing to be gained by extending the duration of pre-existing copyrighted works. You can't encourage a pre-existing work to be created over again.
"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases." - Adolf Hitler
This is the movie trope about a superweapon developed by the bad guys falling into the hands of the good guys. Some of the good guys say destroy it, others say use it to advance the cause of good. The latter wins out and the weapon is used to defeat the bad guys. But then in the future, new bad guys infiltrate the good guys' government and gain control of the superweapon, and use it to carry out the goal of the original bad guys. At which point there's a great big war to fight the bad guys, millions of people die all, of which could've been prevented if they'd destroyed the superweapon in the first place.
Censorship, even well-intended, is just a bad idea fraught with risks and danger. Better to destroy it to prevent it from ever falling into the wrong hands.
The allies in WWII fought for very different reasons.
Stalin fought to defeat Hitler, because Hitler had broken his non-aggression pact and invaded Russia.
The other allies (US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc) fought to preserve and restore freedom and democracy.
The difference between these two became apparent after WWII. As soon as Hitler was gone, Stalin immediately took over the territories his armies occupied and put their people behind an iron curtain of repression no different than what Hitler sought to do, and which arguably did a lot more damage since it lasted 4x as long. The unfortunate people in those countries ended up being liberated from one dictator just to fall under the heel of another. OTOH, the other allies helped rebuild the liberated countries and installed free democracies, even those who had formerly been their enemies - Germany, Japan, Italy. Then they left, so those countries were free to decide their own path into the future.
You see, while the actions were the same, the goals, the reasons for those actions were very different. One fought to amass more power, and Hitler was just the target because he was the other one with power at the time. The others fought to restore freedom - the right to speak, act, choose to do as you wish, and Hitler was just the target because he tried to restrict these things.
While the purported goal of restricting hate speech is laudable, it comes with a tremendous risk. Once you establish government censorship of speech, its original goal can be subverted by the government itself. If the government stays free and democratic, there's no problem. But if the government becomes corrupt, then you've already established a means for it to control the population and prevent it from removing that corruption. The safer course is to do as the allies did after WWII. Restore freedom, then leave the people alone so they can decide their own path into the future.
On an abstract level, the issue here is whether a free democracy is self-sustainable. Those opposed to government censorship believe it is, and that since power flows from the people, leaving the people free to make their own choices and decisions is of the utmost importance. If OTOH, as you propose, a free democracy needs to restrict freedom in order to preserve itself and prevent a Hitler from coming into power, then you have admitted that a free democracy is not self-sustainable. The very act of allowing freedom results in the destruction of a free democracy. If that's the case, instead of trying to pretend that a free democracy is self-sustainable, we should abandon it and come up with a new form of government to replace it that is self-sustainable.
Their content is created by society, so they reflect society. If you don't like what you see reflected, breaking the mirror is a natural impulsive response but it doesn't actually change society. It just lets you pretend what you saw isn't there anymore. But since it was just a mirror, it's still there, only hidden and still festering.
If you're concerned about people being seduced by extremist content they encounter (be it online, in newsletters/books, or just by talking with other people), your effort is better spent figuring out why that extremist content is so seductive to them. Then taking corrective action to make said content no longer so seductive. A true free society does not fear extremist content, because it's educated its people well enough that they'll see the flaws in said content and reject it on their own, no policing by the government required.
A few people who are outliers will still fall for it, whether due to low IQ or mental illness or they just happened to have the right confluence of events in their lives that the extremist message rings true to them. But seeing as your odds of being killed by an extremist in a terrorist attack are somewhere down around your odds of dying in a storm, by a dog bite, or to a lightning strike, it's simply not worth the massive effort being proposed to try to prevent those deaths. Direct that effort instead to mitigating more mundane but deadlier risks, like ladders and swimming pools and stairways (not to mention fires, motor vehicle accidents, and poisoning). Heck, a program which reduces the suicide rate by 5% would save more lives than 100% effective anti-terrorism measures in the UK. (In some countries a mere 1% reduction in suicide rate would suffice.)
You have to actually make a monorail do something for which there is no alternative transportation.
If there's no alternative transportation, then it's a monopoly and probably doesn't deserve its success.
To actually be successful, the monorail has to do something better than the alternative modes of transportation. Given Vancouver's terrible streets (no left turn lanes! Anyone wanting to turn left simply stops in the "fast" lane and waits until there's a break in opposing traffic, meanwhile blocking all traffic behind them), its monorail is one of the best ways to travel around many parts of the city.
Doctors have rigged the payment system (CPT codes) so that specialist procedures are reimbursed many times their worth in time and training.
The doctors didn't rig it. They're reimbursed far over cost because hospitals are required by law to treat emergency room patients regardless of ability to pay. Consequently, when you (with insurance) pay for a procedure, you're not just paying for your own procedure. You're also paying for the same procedure for the uninsured guy who was carted into the emergency room last night with the same problem.
One solution to the problem is to free hospitals from the legal requirement to treat all emergency patients (thus making health insurance much more valuable so presumably more people would get it). Another is some sort of universal health care system where everyone is covered.* That's what's baffled me (a conservative) about the opposition to universal health care - for all intents and purpose we've already had it. Anyone with a severe medical problem can simply walk into an emergency room and (after waiting) get treated, leaving the rest of society to pay for it. Requiring hospitals to treat patients regardless of ability to pay has the same net effect as universal health care, just the accounting is a bit different.
Aside from inefficiency, this doesn't affect costs though. If you want to find added costs, look to the lawsuits. My dad was family practitioner with his own medical office, and was never sued until just before he retired. Malprractice insurance ate up 30% of his gross income. There are a ton of tests and procedures which mostly aren't necessary, but doctors do them anyway just to cover their butts in case they get sued. Doctors implant the stent even though research says it doesn't help, because if they didn't and the patient died of a heart attack, the next of kin would sue them for failing to use the "time-proven practice" of implanting a stent. Add the malpractice insurance cost to the cost of "cover your butt" tests and procedures, and you're right around the 2:1 ratio of per capita healthcare costs in the U.S. vs other developed countries.
At some point we're going to figure out that a courtroom with a jury of 12 who have zero medical or scientific training is a terrible place to decide which medical tests and procedures are worth doing.
* It should also be noted that the "universal" in universal health care only applies to who is covered. It doesn't apply to which treatments are offered. Every country with universal health care has a board which looks at the cost of a treatment vs. its efficacy, and decides whether or not that treatment is cost-effective and so should/shouldn't be offered (the so-called "death panels"). So cost still plays a role in determining which services are available even with universal health care. Sometimes these standards are not applied uniformly either. When my Canadian friend's father was dying of late stage cancer, he was adamant that the hospital do everything and anything to try to extend his life, despite the numerous visits from Canada Health Services representatives trying to convince him that it was over and to let go. People like him who complain and refuse to sign off get better/costlier treatment. Conversely, you can purchase supplemental health insurance in countries with universal health care, which you can then use to pay for a procedure the government has deemed not worth the expense, so it's not like universal health care completely supplants market forces.
A thousand cops being killed does not justify a single innocent person being killed by cops.
That makes no sense at all.We're all people- even cops. If we're innocent (police or civilian), each of our lives is worth the same. It only makes sense if you assume all cops aren't innocent.
And real-life is messy and full of errors. If you set the standard as perfection (no innocents killed), that's an unattainable standard and will result in massive costs elsewhere in the system. You can set it as a goal, but to set it as a requirement is simply unrealistic. If you tell police they face automatic incarceration even if they accidentally kill an innocent, you will have no more police force. They will all quit and nobody will want to replace them.
From what I understand, the 911 call contained some remarkably specific information that could only have originated from someone in a house where, according to the caller, there was an armed family member holding the rest of the family hostage - yet had somehow managed to overlook the caller. That seems like a pretty big red flag that this was *potentially* a crank call to me
The caller pretended to be the killer/hostage-taker. He also stated he'd doused the house in gasoline, which added a time-critical element to the situation (gasoline fumes can ignite on contact with many mundane heat/electric sources).
Basically the caller fed the 911 operator exactly the information needed to cause the police to abandon caution, and thus maximize the chances of the police killing someone. This was a social hack of the 911 and police response system.
The one part of the story I'm unclear on is that 911 operators are supposed to see the phone's address (landline) or location (mobile) when they receive a call. If those didn't match the address the caller claimed this was all happening at, that should've been a red flag. I'm assuming the caller figured out a work-around to spoof his location in the 911 system. (Actually, based on the sign-up procedure for my VoIP phone numbers, I think I know how this could be done.)
Looking at the summary of Iran's history prior to the Shah, it's a real mess. Yes Mossadegh looks like the one bright spot, but he was only in power for 2 years (and not even continuously). Everything that happened before and after looks like more of the same - dictators, coups, invasion, foreign control, assassination. Given that the average tenure of the Prime Minister of Iran was slightly less than 1 year prior to the Shah's takeover (28 of them, including repeats, from 1925 to 1952), I'm no longer so sure of the narrative I had up til now believed that the Shah destroyed a functional democracy. Fledgling democracy maybe, but by no means is it clear that democracy would've lasted had the U.S. and Britain not backed the Shah.
If it turned out that were temporary, unmarked speed restrictions that drivers could only find at the department of transportation's homepage
I have an oversize towing permit (for a boat I own that's over 8.5 ft in width). The restrictions on where I can tow the oversized load changes every week, depending on freeway construction and closures. If I decide to tow my boat on the highway (almost never do, but if), it's my responsibility to check with the CalTrans website (weekly short-term restrictions) to make sure I'm allowed to do so on that route on that particular day. I did opt for email notification, so I receive the PDF by email each week. But it's still my responsibility to check the website before my trip in case there was a new closure added at the last-minute.
The same if I decide to go fishing at San Clemente Island. It's a Navy base, and the Navy sometimes conducts live fire exercises there. It's my responsibility to check which zones will be closed the day I decide to go there, and to stay outside closed zones. You see, unlike your analogy of a car on a road, you cannot put a "closed" sign in the air or on the water.
This is the sort of thing you want pulled from a single authoritative source. That way if the government decides to add a new restriction at the last minute, they only have to update that one source everyone pulls the info from. Pushing the info to every user doesn't work because it breaks every time someone changes their email address or phone number. You can use a push service to augment the system (like the weekly highway restrictions I receive). But the fundamental method of distribution has to be that every affected person knows they're supposed to check the single authoritative source for restrictions and closures. I suspect buried in the manual that came with drone which this guy never read, is a warning that they're supposed to check with the FAA for closures before flying.
The issue isn't whether prostitution can be done between two consenting adults. Nobody really cares about that except people trying to divert the argument from the real issue. The real issue is whether a non-consenting individual can be forced to do it. And studies have found that legalizing prostitution is correlated with an increase in non-consensual prostitution.
Slashdot Mirror
In keeping with the white noise copyright claim in TFA, you should be copyrighting whitespace characters like space and tab.
My workplace only has Verizon (now Frontier) as a choice for Internet. They are charging $35/mo for 768 kbps down / 128 kbps up DSL, $50/mo for 1.5 Mbps down / 256 kbps up, and it isn't even very reliable. My home Internet (Cox-only area) is $90/mo for 200 Mbps down / 10 Mbps up. Frankly I don't need 200 Mbps down, but could use more than 10 Mbps up (for when I VPN into my home network). Net neutrality doesn't fix ISPs charging you an arm and a leg because they have a government-granted monopoly in your area.
An AT&T rep knocked on my door a couple weeks ago to announce they were rolling out fiber to my area, and were expecting pricing to be around $45/mo. Competition fixes both abusive pricing and throttling. If my ISP decides to throttle Netflix for not paying them, and I have a choice of ISPs, all I have to do is switch ISPs to one which doesn't throttle Netflix. The problem net neutrality is trying to solve is entirely caused by these government-granted cable/phone monopolies. (AT&T is only able to offer broadband in my area because they're the local phone monopoly.)
So I would rather have the solution which eliminates both artificial throttling and abusing pricing - competition. The gas and power utilities even provide the model for doing this. You hire a company to build and maintain the distribution wires or pipes going to each home. That company is paid to maintain those lines/pipes, but is prohibited from selling service (gas, electricity, Internet) over them. Instead, they sell access rights to those lines/pipes (at a fixed price regulated by a Public Utilities Commission) to other companies which provide the service. This lets hundreds or even thousands of companies compete against each other to sell you gas, electricity, or Internet service. Thus insuring anyone trying to price gouge you or degrade your service as part of their petty extortion schemes simply puts themselves out of business.
A recall actually wouldn't be that expensive for Intel. Most CPUs and SoCs with the same die size as Intel's CPUs sell for only around $20. The $100 to several $1000 Intel is able to command for their CPUs is due to marketing and them being top dog. The material cost of the Intel* CPUs themselves is only a tiny fraction of their retail price. (Which raises the possibility of Intel doing a recall, taking a charge for it on their books based on the retail price, and getting a tax deduction for the "loss" which exceeds the manufacturing cost of the recall.)
The bigger expense would be in the time to manufacture the CPUs (it would tie up their fabs for years) and the labor of actually replacing them. Desktops are pretty easy, but laptops with soldered BGA CPUs would be difficult to impossible. Another problem is that there simply is no performance-equivalent replacement for the highest-end CPUs. Any fix severely curtails performance, so a fixed CPU which has the same performance as a high-end pre-fix CPU may not exist for for several more years.
* (We're pretty much only talking about Meltdown and Intel. From what I've been reading, the fixes for the other bugs affecting non-Intel CPUs result in minor to negligible performance hits. Which also makes me think I haven't been giving AMD the respect they deserve. I'd assumed they hadn't been able to match Intel's performance because they simply weren't as good at designing processors. Now it appears a large part of the reason was because they refused to follow Intel in doing something that compromised security to generate more performance.)
However, back in the 1960s and 1970s when the 747 was introduced, there were some other factors favoring 4 engines.
The W3C made themselves irrelevant when they took 12 years to update from HTML 4 (1999) to HTML 5 (2011 to begin finalizing the spec, it didn't become official until 2014).
They're the ones responsible for Adobe Flash (nee Macromedia Flash) becoming the de facto standard for multimedia on the web. Web designers begged for a way to implement things like in-line video and audio, and dynamic web menus via HTML. The W3C refused to add those features. So web designers looked for other ways to do it. And lo and behold there was this animation tool called Flash would could be made to do those things. Flash was never intended to become a multimedia web standard. Its designers only made it so you could transmit animated videos over low-bandwidth dialup links, so security wasn't high on their priority list.
The demand for these features was so palpable that web browsers were implementing proposed HTML 5 features as early as 2009, while the W3C was taking their sweet time. The W3C taught everyone that you'll die of old age (in Internet terms) if you wait for the W3C. So if you want a new feature in HTML, just implement it yourself and if enough other people want it they'll jump on board with you. And it'll become the de facto standard. No need to wait for the W3C.
To understand why, you have to understand the economics of EVs. The real economics - not the "EV sales are rising because more people want them" rose-tinted version its proponents like to believe.
EV sales are taking off because of CARB (California Air Resources Board). They have a ZEV mandate (zero emissions vehicles - mostly EVs though Toyota has a hydrogen vehicle on the market). Beginning in 2013 or 2014, CARB required a certain percentage of each manufacturer's vehicle sales to be ZEVs or PZEVs (partial ZEVs - basically plug-in hybrids). The percentage goes up every year. The formula is a bit complex but it's about 2% ZEVs for 2018, and supposed to reach over 15% by 2025.
If a manufacturer fails to reach this percentage, the manufacturer must buy ZEV credits from another manufacturer which exceeded its required quota. This is what keeps Tesla afloat. Since they only sell ZEVs, they always have excess credits which they sell to other manufacturers who didn't sell enough ZEVs. That's right - if you buy an ICE vehicle, you are likely subsidizing someone buying a $70,000 Tesla. This is also why Tesla is in no hurry to ramp up Tesla 3 production. They don't want to flood the ZEV credit market - that would devalue their own credits. So they're going to ramp up production just barely fast enough to keep up with how many credits other manufacturers need to buy to comply with CARB's requirement.
If the manufacturer fails to sell enough EVs or buy enough ZEV credits, they are banned from selling cars in California. Since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's rules, that ban would extend to about 1/3 of the U.S. by population. No manufacturer wants to be banned from that huge chunk of the market, so they do whatever they can to sell enough EVs to comply with CARB's ZEV mandate. This means sales, discounts, incentives, whatever it takes to get however many EVs they need into buyers' hands to satisfy CARB's requirements. This is why the EV deals are better in California than in other states - CARB only counts EVs which are sold in California. So California is where automakers offer the biggest EV incentives. I almost pulled the trigger on a 3-year e-Golf lease in 2016 for $500 down, $79/mo in Los Angeles (the Bay Area had zero down, $79/mo available).
Since EVs are not actually popular with buyers (at least not at the percentage the ZEV mandate requires), this means the manufacturers have to sell the vehicles at below true market value to generate sufficient sales (sometimes even below manufacturing cost). If they're going to do this, leasing it is preferable to selling it. With a sale, they've lost the entire manufacturing cost of the vehicle. With a lease, they at least get the materials for the vehicle back at the end, which they can then reuse or recycle. And if the blue book value of the EV is less at the end of the lease than was projected, they can write off the difference and get a tax deduction for the loss. Leasing also allows anyone to take advantage of the full $7500 federal tax credit. Being a tax credit, you have to owe at least $7500 in income taxes to take full advantage of it. Based on IRS tax stats, this means the buyer needs to make more than about $70,000/yr to take advantage of the full tax credit. But if you lease it, the tax credit goes to the car manufacturer, who pays a lot more than $7500 in taxes each year. So they can take advantage of the full credit and pass it on to the buyer. That means the real price for a leased EV for anyone making less than $70,000/yr is often less than for a purchased EV.
All this is why the blue book value of a used EV is so low. The ZEV mandate only applies to new vehicle sales, not used EVs. The incentives lower the price, effectively causing more new EVs to be sold or leased than would've at the correct market p
"Up to" is a useless marketing term when only a single benchmark is given. Edge could be slower than Chrome at everything except one test, and you could still truthfully state that it was "up to 48%" faster than Chrome.
For a one-line statement like that to be meaningful, it has to refer to average speed, or "at least".
I'm pretty ambivalent towards this (not really a big music fan). But the way I see it, as long as the music industry is trying sell you a product that they are not paying for, then it seems to me that turnabout is fair play.
The copyright bargain is that content creators get a temporary copyright on their work in order to stoke a permanent increase in the rate at which such works enter the public domain (by incentivizing the creation of such works and thus increasing the rate at which they're created). i.e. The payment for their right to sell to you their works, is that those works must eventually be introduced into the public domain. If those content creators finagle the law so their works are no longer entering the public domain, or that it takes so long for said works to enter the public domain that they have no value by the time that happens (1897's greatest hits anyone?), then they themselves have broken the copyright bargain. And as such their copyright protections are forfeit.
Contract law 101. Both parties to the contract must give up something of value to each other in the exchange. If only one side is giving something up, then the contract is not binding, and thus invalid, and there is no copyright protection.
Couldn't the Iranian government just claim they detected foreign countries attempting to influence last year's election via social media, and use that as U.S.-proof justification for blocking access to social media sites? I mean I know it'd be ridiculous. But that's why censorship is a very slippery slope.
If that's what you believe, then you'd better start condemning Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, the UK and ironically Mexico for succumbing to this insipid takeover by the aristocracy via voter ID cards.
If we applied to other programs the same standard opponents of voter ID cards use (it was abused in the past, so it must never be implemented), we'd have to eliminate pretty much every government program in existence including social security, medicare, food stamps, public housing, unemployment insurance. Such an uncompromising position ("anywhere it's been implemented") is nothing more than playing the race card.
The most direct impact of corporate taxes are on shareholder dividends, since that's basically distribution of profit to shareholders.* Increase the corporate tax, decrease the shareholder dividend. For a company existing in a single country, this is simple - just eliminate the corporate tax and crank up the income tax rate on dividends. Then no matter what sorts of bookkeeping shenanigans the company plays, the tax is still collected since at some point the money has to move from the company to the shareholders. For multi-national companies, this is more complicated since the shareholders may not be subject to income tax in the same countries where the sales were made.
But if maintaining the tax in the country of sale is your concern, you can simply shift the tax into a sales tax. This has the same effect as a corporate tax or income tax on dividends.
The difference being that in the 50% corporate tax case, shareholders can reduce their tax (on profit) by charging expenses to an overseas subsidiary, which shifts the money overseas without paying taxes on it. OTOH the 20% sales tax generates the same tax revenue, except the shareholders can't reduce the tax by tricky bookkeeping. A $100 product was sold and $20 in taxes collected, which must go to the local government.
That's what the OP is getting at. Distinguishing between sales tax, corporate tax, and personal income tax is economic homeopathy. There is no difference. You're attributing sentimentality based on which stage of the economic transaction the taxes are extracted at, when the money doesn't remember, the math doesn't care, and the net end result is the same. Since the end results are the same, and since it's ridiculously difficult to extract taxes consistently from a multinational corporation, instead of trying to extract taxes from their profit you should extract taxes from other stages of their economic transactions - use a sales tax.
* (It's a bit different in Google's case since they don't pay dividends. They keep all their profit as retained earnings. Still, there's no problem with not taxing this if you also tax interest income. The tax-free retained earnings will actually decline in value due to inflation, and there's probably more profitable places for them to spend the money than an interest-bearing savings account. And as before, if you want the taxes to remain in the country where the transaction occurred, a sales tax is still does that. Any subsequent retained earnings is money that you weren't going to tax anyway, so you shouldn't care what Google does with it. Unless they use it for more economic activity in your country, like purchasing equipment or expanding operations or investing in stocks. And you can tax that independently of the original economic transaction.)
The fundamental "problem" is that taxation is not a natural state. It's an artificial construct created to divert money from the private sector to government coffers (in a method deemed "fair" by the government - the people in democracies, whatever the ruler wants in dictatorships).
Since it's artificial and not natural, taxation can never be foolproof. Short of the government completely taking over the economy (which is what Communism tried to do), there will always be loopholes and workarounds. It's a game of whack-a-mole. Or my preferred analogy is a tube of toothpaste under too much pressure. If it's leaking out of a hole and you patch the hole, the pressure will just find the next weakest spot and start leaking out of that. The more successful an economy (or portion of the economy is), the greater the pressure, and the more likely it is to find a new hole for avoiding taxes.
That's why I've advocated not taxing corporate profit. Corporations can exist simultaneously in multiple countries, which substantially complicates collecting taxes from them. If you were to instead implement the tax as something contained entirely within a single country - like a sales tax - it would accomplish the exact same thing. Company sells an item and collects $x from the customer, a percentage of which is diverted to the government as taxes. (The money doesn't "remember" which stage of the transaction it was diverted to the government at, so it doesn't matter if it's diverted at the time of sale or at a later point.) If you implement it as a tax on profit, that gives the company the opportunity to water down the income and shift it overseas by charging itself additional expenses from offshore subsidiaries. If you implement it as a sales tax, there's no way to remove it from the country of sale it since it's a fixed percentage of every sale.
(And no this doesn't shift the tax burden from the corporation to the buyer. Corporations don't pay taxes because they don't generate productivity - their employees and shareholders do, and their customers generate productivity using the products they buy. Any corporate tax you implement is simply shifted to customers as higher prices, to employees as lower wages, and to shareholders as reduced dividends. If you compare with the same initial state - no taxes - adding sales tax produces the same mathematical result as the shareholders deciding to increase the price in order to maintain their dividends after a corporate tax is implemented. Except the sales tax can't be avoided, while the corporate tax can be by using tricky bookkeeping to shift the money overseas.)
Just to give a window into what it's like from the other side, when I was managing a company with 60 employees, we had to fire one of them. He was head of his department and we were pretty sure he was embezzling (his replacement eventually confirmed this when he went through a half year of purchase orders and compared to what was in inventory). About a month later I got a phone call from the company he'd applied for a job at - he had given me as a reference.
I wasn't sure what I was allowed to say so gave the excuse that I was way too busy and could they please call back the next day. We had unlimited phone access to employment lawyers as part of our employment liability insurance, so I called them up and explained the situation. They told me flat out that unless we had rock-solid proof he was embezzling, under no circumstances should I state that as the reason we had let him go. I couldn't mention any of our suspicions or circumstantial evidence either. We couldn't (or shouldn't) mention any negatives in his reference unless we had documentation on file to back it up (like signed formal reprimands - I had always wondered why we had to have 2 other people in the room with the employee when we gave a reprimand, and why the employee was required to sign them).
The next day when they called back I had to water down our experience with him as "he didn't fit well with the company." I stammered and hesitated while saying it, and I think I succeeded in getting the message across that there was a lot more to it than that but I wasn't legally allowed to say it. I understand now why there's an art to double entendres and backhanded compliments when it comes to job references.
So the distinguishing factor isn't low-level vs high-level employee. It's "differences" when it's on the record and the company doesn't have rock-solid proof (i.e. they could be sued for libel or slander). It's "burning bridges" when it's off the record or the company has rock-solid proof. High-level employees just get the "differences" explanation more often because they're better at covering their butts than low-level employees.
Cardboard (and paper) should be thrown in the trash. Our problem with climate change stems from pumping hydrocarbons (coal/oil/gas) out of the ground, and burning them. This combines the carbon with atmospheric oxygen to create carbon dioxide (and releases energy). The CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
Trees pull CO2 out of the air and use sunlight to convert it back into hydrocarbons (sugars, eventually linked together to form cellulose). When you throw paper and cardboard into the trash, it ends up in a landfill. i.e. Back underground where we pumped the carbon out of in the first place. Some biological decomposition happens in landfills (we pump methane out of landfills). But core samples drilled into landfills has turned up bits of newspaper from the 1800s, still legible, indicating the carbon has for the most part been successfully sequestered underground.
If you eliminate recycling of paper and cardboard, this increases the price of paper. Trees have to be cut down to create new paper and cardboard, and the higher price creates an incentive to re-seed the forests where these trees were cut down, so they can be harvested again in a few decades. These additional trees pull even more CO2 out of the atmosphere. We could even get into a situation where the slash and burn practices in the Amazon are reversed - it could become more valuable to plant trees to replace those which were clear-cut.
Recycling cardboard and paper is bad for the environment.
Existing works should've continued to be subject to their original copyright term. The new copyright duration should've only applied to new works - things created after the copyright extension act was passed. Kinda the inverse of grandfathering and ex post facto laws. This prevents an immediate beneficiary of the change to the law from unduly influencing the process of changing the law. Everyone takes a step back and considers the entire ramifications of the change to the law, instead of considering only the tiny immediate effect of the change.
The rationale for this is that the whole point of copyright is to encourage the creation of artistic works. Since the pre-existing work has already been made, copyright has already has served its function and encouraged its creation. So there is nothing to be gained by extending the duration of pre-existing copyrighted works. You can't encourage a pre-existing work to be created over again.
"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases." - Adolf Hitler
This is the movie trope about a superweapon developed by the bad guys falling into the hands of the good guys. Some of the good guys say destroy it, others say use it to advance the cause of good. The latter wins out and the weapon is used to defeat the bad guys. But then in the future, new bad guys infiltrate the good guys' government and gain control of the superweapon, and use it to carry out the goal of the original bad guys. At which point there's a great big war to fight the bad guys, millions of people die all, of which could've been prevented if they'd destroyed the superweapon in the first place.
Censorship, even well-intended, is just a bad idea fraught with risks and danger. Better to destroy it to prevent it from ever falling into the wrong hands.
The difference between these two became apparent after WWII. As soon as Hitler was gone, Stalin immediately took over the territories his armies occupied and put their people behind an iron curtain of repression no different than what Hitler sought to do, and which arguably did a lot more damage since it lasted 4x as long. The unfortunate people in those countries ended up being liberated from one dictator just to fall under the heel of another. OTOH, the other allies helped rebuild the liberated countries and installed free democracies, even those who had formerly been their enemies - Germany, Japan, Italy. Then they left, so those countries were free to decide their own path into the future.
You see, while the actions were the same, the goals, the reasons for those actions were very different. One fought to amass more power, and Hitler was just the target because he was the other one with power at the time. The others fought to restore freedom - the right to speak, act, choose to do as you wish, and Hitler was just the target because he tried to restrict these things.
While the purported goal of restricting hate speech is laudable, it comes with a tremendous risk. Once you establish government censorship of speech, its original goal can be subverted by the government itself. If the government stays free and democratic, there's no problem. But if the government becomes corrupt, then you've already established a means for it to control the population and prevent it from removing that corruption. The safer course is to do as the allies did after WWII. Restore freedom, then leave the people alone so they can decide their own path into the future.
On an abstract level, the issue here is whether a free democracy is self-sustainable. Those opposed to government censorship believe it is, and that since power flows from the people, leaving the people free to make their own choices and decisions is of the utmost importance. If OTOH, as you propose, a free democracy needs to restrict freedom in order to preserve itself and prevent a Hitler from coming into power, then you have admitted that a free democracy is not self-sustainable. The very act of allowing freedom results in the destruction of a free democracy. If that's the case, instead of trying to pretend that a free democracy is self-sustainable, we should abandon it and come up with a new form of government to replace it that is self-sustainable.
Their content is created by society, so they reflect society. If you don't like what you see reflected, breaking the mirror is a natural impulsive response but it doesn't actually change society. It just lets you pretend what you saw isn't there anymore. But since it was just a mirror, it's still there, only hidden and still festering.
If you're concerned about people being seduced by extremist content they encounter (be it online, in newsletters/books, or just by talking with other people), your effort is better spent figuring out why that extremist content is so seductive to them. Then taking corrective action to make said content no longer so seductive. A true free society does not fear extremist content, because it's educated its people well enough that they'll see the flaws in said content and reject it on their own, no policing by the government required.
A few people who are outliers will still fall for it, whether due to low IQ or mental illness or they just happened to have the right confluence of events in their lives that the extremist message rings true to them. But seeing as your odds of being killed by an extremist in a terrorist attack are somewhere down around your odds of dying in a storm, by a dog bite, or to a lightning strike, it's simply not worth the massive effort being proposed to try to prevent those deaths. Direct that effort instead to mitigating more mundane but deadlier risks, like ladders and swimming pools and stairways (not to mention fires, motor vehicle accidents, and poisoning). Heck, a program which reduces the suicide rate by 5% would save more lives than 100% effective anti-terrorism measures in the UK. (In some countries a mere 1% reduction in suicide rate would suffice.)
If there's no alternative transportation, then it's a monopoly and probably doesn't deserve its success.
To actually be successful, the monorail has to do something better than the alternative modes of transportation. Given Vancouver's terrible streets (no left turn lanes! Anyone wanting to turn left simply stops in the "fast" lane and waits until there's a break in opposing traffic, meanwhile blocking all traffic behind them), its monorail is one of the best ways to travel around many parts of the city.
The doctors didn't rig it. They're reimbursed far over cost because hospitals are required by law to treat emergency room patients regardless of ability to pay. Consequently, when you (with insurance) pay for a procedure, you're not just paying for your own procedure. You're also paying for the same procedure for the uninsured guy who was carted into the emergency room last night with the same problem.
One solution to the problem is to free hospitals from the legal requirement to treat all emergency patients (thus making health insurance much more valuable so presumably more people would get it). Another is some sort of universal health care system where everyone is covered.* That's what's baffled me (a conservative) about the opposition to universal health care - for all intents and purpose we've already had it. Anyone with a severe medical problem can simply walk into an emergency room and (after waiting) get treated, leaving the rest of society to pay for it. Requiring hospitals to treat patients regardless of ability to pay has the same net effect as universal health care, just the accounting is a bit different.
Aside from inefficiency, this doesn't affect costs though. If you want to find added costs, look to the lawsuits. My dad was family practitioner with his own medical office, and was never sued until just before he retired. Malprractice insurance ate up 30% of his gross income. There are a ton of tests and procedures which mostly aren't necessary, but doctors do them anyway just to cover their butts in case they get sued. Doctors implant the stent even though research says it doesn't help, because if they didn't and the patient died of a heart attack, the next of kin would sue them for failing to use the "time-proven practice" of implanting a stent. Add the malpractice insurance cost to the cost of "cover your butt" tests and procedures, and you're right around the 2:1 ratio of per capita healthcare costs in the U.S. vs other developed countries.
At some point we're going to figure out that a courtroom with a jury of 12 who have zero medical or scientific training is a terrible place to decide which medical tests and procedures are worth doing.
* It should also be noted that the "universal" in universal health care only applies to who is covered. It doesn't apply to which treatments are offered. Every country with universal health care has a board which looks at the cost of a treatment vs. its efficacy, and decides whether or not that treatment is cost-effective and so should/shouldn't be offered (the so-called "death panels"). So cost still plays a role in determining which services are available even with universal health care. Sometimes these standards are not applied uniformly either. When my Canadian friend's father was dying of late stage cancer, he was adamant that the hospital do everything and anything to try to extend his life, despite the numerous visits from Canada Health Services representatives trying to convince him that it was over and to let go. People like him who complain and refuse to sign off get better/costlier treatment. Conversely, you can purchase supplemental health insurance in countries with universal health care, which you can then use to pay for a procedure the government has deemed not worth the expense, so it's not like universal health care completely supplants market forces.
That makes no sense at all.We're all people- even cops. If we're innocent (police or civilian), each of our lives is worth the same. It only makes sense if you assume all cops aren't innocent.
And real-life is messy and full of errors. If you set the standard as perfection (no innocents killed), that's an unattainable standard and will result in massive costs elsewhere in the system. You can set it as a goal, but to set it as a requirement is simply unrealistic. If you tell police they face automatic incarceration even if they accidentally kill an innocent, you will have no more police force. They will all quit and nobody will want to replace them.
The caller pretended to be the killer/hostage-taker. He also stated he'd doused the house in gasoline, which added a time-critical element to the situation (gasoline fumes can ignite on contact with many mundane heat/electric sources).
Basically the caller fed the 911 operator exactly the information needed to cause the police to abandon caution, and thus maximize the chances of the police killing someone. This was a social hack of the 911 and police response system.
The one part of the story I'm unclear on is that 911 operators are supposed to see the phone's address (landline) or location (mobile) when they receive a call. If those didn't match the address the caller claimed this was all happening at, that should've been a red flag. I'm assuming the caller figured out a work-around to spoof his location in the 911 system. (Actually, based on the sign-up procedure for my VoIP phone numbers, I think I know how this could be done.)
Looking at the summary of Iran's history prior to the Shah, it's a real mess. Yes Mossadegh looks like the one bright spot, but he was only in power for 2 years (and not even continuously). Everything that happened before and after looks like more of the same - dictators, coups, invasion, foreign control, assassination. Given that the average tenure of the Prime Minister of Iran was slightly less than 1 year prior to the Shah's takeover (28 of them, including repeats, from 1925 to 1952), I'm no longer so sure of the narrative I had up til now believed that the Shah destroyed a functional democracy. Fledgling democracy maybe, but by no means is it clear that democracy would've lasted had the U.S. and Britain not backed the Shah.
I have an oversize towing permit (for a boat I own that's over 8.5 ft in width). The restrictions on where I can tow the oversized load changes every week, depending on freeway construction and closures. If I decide to tow my boat on the highway (almost never do, but if), it's my responsibility to check with the CalTrans website (weekly short-term restrictions) to make sure I'm allowed to do so on that route on that particular day. I did opt for email notification, so I receive the PDF by email each week. But it's still my responsibility to check the website before my trip in case there was a new closure added at the last-minute.
The same if I decide to go fishing at San Clemente Island. It's a Navy base, and the Navy sometimes conducts live fire exercises there. It's my responsibility to check which zones will be closed the day I decide to go there, and to stay outside closed zones. You see, unlike your analogy of a car on a road, you cannot put a "closed" sign in the air or on the water.
This is the sort of thing you want pulled from a single authoritative source. That way if the government decides to add a new restriction at the last minute, they only have to update that one source everyone pulls the info from. Pushing the info to every user doesn't work because it breaks every time someone changes their email address or phone number. You can use a push service to augment the system (like the weekly highway restrictions I receive). But the fundamental method of distribution has to be that every affected person knows they're supposed to check the single authoritative source for restrictions and closures. I suspect buried in the manual that came with drone which this guy never read, is a warning that they're supposed to check with the FAA for closures before flying.
The issue isn't whether prostitution can be done between two consenting adults. Nobody really cares about that except people trying to divert the argument from the real issue. The real issue is whether a non-consenting individual can be forced to do it. And studies have found that legalizing prostitution is correlated with an increase in non-consensual prostitution.